In keeping with our philosophy on free/open-source software, here you may periodically find a few bits and pieces that we have produced as part of our on-going work and have had the opportunity to make available for download under an open-source license.
This is a small application for tunnelling an arbitrary TCP socket connection over HTTP. It can be used, for example, to tunnel traffic out from behind a restrictive firewall that only allows outgoing HTTP web connections.
NEWS: We are also now offering a commercial HTTP tunneling service based on this HTTP Tunnel software, called FireDrill. By using the FireDrill service you remove the need to run your own HTTP Tunnel server and can instead tunnel all traffic through our servers. As well as the existing freely downloadable Linux/Unix/OSX HTTP tunneling client the FireDrill service also includes a new client for Microsoft Windows users. For more information, or to try it out for free, please see the FireDrill homepage.
The latest versions of HTTP Tunnel / FireDrill include support for features such as:
The basic idea is that you run an instance of the HTTP Tunnel application locally in 'client' mode, that then connects out to another instance that you run at the remote end of the tunnel in 'server' mode. You then connect to the local client end of the tunnel with the application whose traffic you wish to tunnel, and all communications are then wrapped in HTTP. The tunnel may also go via a HTTP proxy, either explicitly or transparently.
Since all tunneled traffic is routed via the HTTP Tunnel server, a further side effect of this tunneling is that the client also gains an extra layer of anonymity on the Internet. This is due to the HTTP Tunnel server acting as a proxy to the client, and thus making it appear that the clients traffic actually originates from the servers IP address.
For more information please refer to the documentation included within the archive.