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by fulafel 4249 days ago
No, "transparent proxying" is a clear violation of HTTP specs (as well as TCP protocol, and IP's "thou shall not mess with packets in transit" principle/specs). It's essentially a MITM attack and all bets are off wrt correctness.
1 comments
ldng 4248 days ago
We'll disagree then :)

From RFC 2616 "The HTTP/1.1 protocol allows origin servers, caches, and clients to explicitly reduce transparency when necessary."

As I said, bad configurations dos not mean the principle is unsound.

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fulafel 4248 days ago
No, RFC 2616 uses transparency in a different meaning that the common usage of "transparent proxy" is.

Common meaning (from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proxy_server#Transparent_proxy): "Also known as an intercepting proxy, inline proxy, or forced proxy, a transparent proxy intercepts normal communication at the network layer"

RFC 2616 uses the term to describe a property of a normal, opt-in HTTP proxy: "A 'transparent proxy' is a proxy that does not modify the request or response"

In preceding discussion we were using the term in its common usage meaning.

Also, you misrepresent what RFC 2616 says about the its concept of transparency. The part you quoted continues:

  "the protocol requires that transparency be relaxed

      - only by an explicit protocol-level request when
        relaxed by client or origin server

      - only with an explicit warning to the end user when relaxed by
        cache or client "
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