Trilight Zone

[digital8]

We know that a Secure Socket Layer is safe, but what we don?t know is what a Tunnel is. In the most simplistic form, a tunnel is a proxy. Like proxy voting in general elections, a tunnel will relay your data back and forth for you. You may be aware though, that there are already ?proxies? out there, and yes, that is true. Tunnelling is done via proxies, but it is not considered to be the same as a standard proxy relaying simply because it isn?t.

Tunnelling is very special kind of proxy relay, in that it can, and does relay data without interfering. It does this transparently and without grievance or any care for what is passing its way.

Now, if we add this ability to ?tunnel? data, any data, in a pipe, to the Secure Sockets Layer, we have a closed connection that is independent of the software carrying it; and something that is also encrypted. For those of you wanting to know a little more about the technicalities, the SSL layer is also classless in the sense it does not interferer with the data passed back and forth ? after all, it is encrypted and impossible to tamper with. That attribute means an SSL capable proxy is able to transfer data out of its ?proxied? connection to the destination required.

So to sum up, we have both a secure connection that does the job and relays things in the right direction; and we have direct tunnel that doesn?t care what we pass through it. Two very useful, and almost blind entities. All we need now is a secure proxy that we can use as the tunnel.

Proxies:

Secure proxies are alike standard proxies. We can either use an HTTP base SSL equipped proxy - one specifically designed for security HTTP traffic, but because of the ignorant nature of SSL communication, it can be bent to any needs ? or we can use a proper SSL service designed for our connection ? like you would use a secure NNTP (news) program with a secure proxy on port 563 instead of taking our long way - which would probably work as well.

A secure HTTP proxy operates on port 443. Host proxies are not public, that means they operate for, and allow only traffic from their subnet or the ISP that operates them ? but, there are many badly configured HTTP proxies and some public ones out there. The use of a program called HTTrack (available on Neworder) will aid you in scanning and searching for proxies on your network or anywhere on the Internet if your ISP does not provide you with one.