Re: [tor-bugs] #6060 [Tor]: add http proxy support to Tor

["Tor Bug Tracker & Wiki" <blackhole@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

#6060: add http proxy support to Tor
----------------------------+-----------------------------------------------
    Reporter:  proper       |       Owner:  arma               
        Type:  enhancement  |      Status:  reopened           
    Priority:  normal       |   Milestone:  Tor: very long term
   Component:  Tor          |     Version:                     
  Resolution:               |    Keywords:  tor-client         
      Parent:               |      Points:                     
Actualpoints:               |  
----------------------------+-----------------------------------------------

Comment(by fk):

 It has been brought to my attention that somebody is wrong on the Internet
 and I'm here to help.

 Privoxy has been able to leverage Tor's stream separation by using
 separate socks ports for years. It's commonly done by request tagging, I
 rely on it every day to separate Firefox, fetch, curl and various other
 clients I use and it is working (for me) as expected:
 http://config.privoxy.org/user-manual/actions-file.html#CLIENT-HEADER-
 TAGGER

 While there is currently no IsolateSOCKSAuth support, that's mainly
 because nobody cared enough to provide patches as stream separation is
 already available through other means:
 http://sourceforge.net/tracker/?func=detail&aid=3541363&group_id=11118&atid=361118

 Even if this wasn't the case, I don't think the paraphrased argument
 "Privoxy and Polipo suck, therefore Tor needs to act as HTTP proxy" is a
 particular good one.


 If the Tor project really wants to reverse the current policy and ship a
 HTTP proxy with Tor again, I think it would be worth trying to communicate
 with the various HTTP proxy upstreams about what the requirements are, to
 see if they can be satisfied already or maybe in a future release after
 adding the missing pieces (potentially by accepting the required patches).

 It's water under the bridge, but in my opinion the Tor project has a
 pretty poor track record when it comes to working with HTTP proxy
 upstreams and especially the recent number it did on Juliusz probably
 didn't help to instill goodwill in general.

 As far as native HTTP proxy support in Tor is concerned, I agree with Jake
 that a HttpPort implementation that only supports CONNECT requests would
 be comparably trivial to implement, but like to point out that most HTTP
 clients have no support for tunneling http:// requests through HTTP
 proxies by using CONNECT. And those that do probably already support
 socks5 anyway.

 One of the obvious risks of implementing support for HTTP methods other
 than CONNECT without constantly monitoring and parsing the arriving data
 (which requires implementing a significant amount of RFC2616) would be
 requests on a reused connection ending up at the wrong server.

 Nowadays some clients aggressively pipeline requests right away instead of
 waiting for the first response as "suggested" in the standard and in this
 case the old "trick" of changing the Connection header in the first
 arriving request to "Connection: close" and trusting without properly
 verifying that client and server respect it no longer cuts it.

 Full disclosure: it's "fk" as in "Fabian Keil" and I'm obviously biased.

-- 
Ticket URL: <https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/6060#comment:39>
Tor Bug Tracker & Wiki <https://trac.torproject.org/>
The Tor Project: anonymity online
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