transports

A HTTP proxy that aims to support different transports.

Motivation

I started the facebook tunnel project two years ago and I thought that it could be better to follow a modular approach for supporting other services (chat systems, platforms, *gram, *book?).

This repository includes some code to explore the idea.

Why not a TCP/UDP tunnel?

At this time I'm not planning tuntap support (like I did in the previous project). I would like to focus on the transports. Also, I think that a HTTP proxy is easier to port and run, especially when considering that the project is built on Golang, where the output is a static binary. For example, it'll be very easy to build a binary for ARM.

Available transports

I've been working on these transports during the past week:

Facebook Transport (early stage, sorry!)

This transport uses surf, a stateful web browser built in Go.

Load your credentials by using export or the .env file:

[email protected]
FB_PASSWORD=supersecretpass
FB_FRIEND=yourtunnelfriend

I'm looking for collaborators from countries where the Internet.org campaigns like "Free Basics" are active, they could benefit from it :)

Whatsapp Transport (status: you can perform some GETs)

This transport uses a HTTP wrapper for yowsup to send/receive Whatsapp messages.

I recorded this small video, showing some interactions with this transport. For the demonstration I point my browser to the proxy and perform a test request to Akamai, the communication happens between two Whatsapp clients running on the same computer:

It would be good to have a "pure Golang" Whatsapp library but I think the current approach is fine for experimentation (anyone considering writing this?).

The following environment variables are used:

WA_CLIENT_LOGIN=123412341
WA_CLIENT_PASSWORD=whatsappgeneratedpassword123
WA_CLIENT_CONTACT=43214321

WA_SERVER_LOGIN=123412341
WA_SERVER_PASSWORD=whatsappgeneratedpassword123

Requires Python 3

Marshalers

I'm working on providing a set of "marshalers" and a simple API to combine them, this could be useful for conducting network/system usage benchmark experiments & performing a good choice.

Protocol buffers sound like a good option, instead of JSON (which is what I'm actually using for the Whatsapp transport). Also brotli looks promising. A combination of these two is a very interesting thing to consider.

Tor support

There's a Tor integration idea for the server side, I've did a few tests with it, under the following scenario:

The Whatsapp transport includes a flag to enable Tor (UseTor), I'm expecting to extend this flag to any transport.

The Tor support is achieved by overriding the default http.Transport dialer with a custom one.

Ideas/to-do

• Handle SSL.
• Extend the test coverage.
• Think about some way of debugging the transports/traffic.
• Run basic tests in additional platforms (e.g. ARM).
• Plan strategies for mobile support, Golang is doing great progress on this.
• Multiplexing

Contributors

• Matias Insaurralde

• Carlos Carvallo

License

MIT