A Novel Approach to Manage Asymmetric Traffic Flows for Secure Network Proxies

  • Authors:
  • Qing Li

  • Affiliations:
  • Blue Coat Systems Inc., Sunnyvale, USA CA 94085-4121

  • Venue:
  • NPC '08 Proceedings of the IFIP International Conference on Network and Parallel Computing
  • Year:
  • 2008

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Abstract

A transparent secure network proxy intercepts web traffic such as HTTP requests and applies access policies to the intercepted traffic. The proxy will reinitiate a request on behalf of the client when policies permit. Depending on policy configuration, this proxy may masquerade as the client when generating the request. The response from the server may reach the client instead of the proxy due to asymmetric routing, and if so, would be rejected by the client as an invalid response. Consequently the proxy can not complete the original request. This paper presents a new protocol and a comprehensive mechanism that facilitates the formation of a cluster comprised of multiple proxies. This proxy cluster can cover a network that spans a large geographical area, and collaboratively discover and redirect asymmetrically routed traffic flows towards the appropriate member proxy. The protocol and the algorithms presented in this paper can operate in both IPv4 and IPv6 [1] networks.