brandgang 0.1

brandgang is a http firewall tunneling for Java applets with restricted network.

You should install the software like this:

Extract the archive to a (home-)directory. For now there are no
installation scripts or further installation instructions.

tar -xzvf brandgang-0.1.xxx.tar.gz

WinZip users check: TAR file smart CR/LF Conversion.

You will need to create directories "var" and "lib" by hand, if your
archiver ignores empty directories. Check MANIFEST for anything
missing.

Product's homepage

Here are some key features of "brandgang":

· This transparently uses the browser configured proxy, simulating duplex communication, by multiple java.net.HttpURLConnections to a http tunnel server, that forwards the connection. Because no reference to the proxy is made, no security exceptions will be thrown for restricted applets.

· A combination of encryption (RSA/RC4) and message digests(MD5) is used in an effort to secure an insecure datapath. Though this comes with only a (small) telnet and SSH client, it is supposed to be easy to modify other networking applets to use tunnels.

· You can still use modified clients for direct connections over tcp sockets. You can also use secured connections to the tunnel server over a common tcp socket, and have the connection forwarded.

· The tunnel server can forward to multiple servers, handling multiple tunnels concurrently. The tunnel server can handle requests from http clients for files,
· so you don't need to run any (other) httpd to host the applets. The tunnel server can be used to enable access to a LAN. You can allow accepting and connecting hosts for the tunnel server (besides setting a Java security policy).

· Both server and clients are written in Java.

Requirements:

· Java 1.1.x or higher for the server:
· http://java.sun.com/products/
· http://www.blackdown.org/java-linux.html
· http://www.alphaworks.ibm.com/tech/linuxjvm
· http://www.apple.com/java/
· http://java.sun.com/cgi-bin/java-ports.cgi
· Maybe client-side is 1.0.x compatible? I made some effort, but haven't tested yet.
· Java networking with Winsock1.1 is unreliable. I learned that the hard way:-( Upgrade to Winsock2.0: http://support.microsoft.com/support/kb/articles/Q177/7/19.asp