Disable websockets on windows - websocket

I am working a project that involves a java client interacting with a socket.io based server over websockets. In order to test fallback from websockets to xhr-polling i need to simulate a websocket blocking on my windows host.
How can this be done ?

It is not trivial to disable websocket in Windows firewall. Disabling this protocol in browser is not a way - in case you want to test fallback when websocket supported by browser but blocked by firewall, antivirus, domain policy rules, ...
I've simulated this behaviour by running nodejs server with grunt-connect-proxy. By default it blocks ws:// protocol but you can easy enable it using
option.ws = true

Related

WebSocket security?

I have a custom websockets server (non-secure) implemented with of libuv. Same server also supports some HTTP requests (source).
Everything works just fine if I listen on 127.0.0.1, except some users are reporting that they can't connect from remote systems. HTTP requests work fine if I listen on 0.0.0.0 but browsers and VS Code do not seem to even try to send Upgrade request. What could be the reason? Could it be my workstation setup (e.g. some sort of a firewall)?
Something wrong with my corp network settings - works just fine in other networks...

SIP over websockets to true SIP

I'm trying to implement a sip server for connecting to from an HTML sip client(made using sipml5). During my research into doing this I've come across sip over web-sockets which might be useful to me, however, I am unsure if a user agent connecting through sip over web-sockets to a compatible server would then be able to successfully make a call to some one using an incompatible server(i.e. calling from SIP over web-sockets to true SIP).
I know webrtc2sip can be used for connecting to legacy networks but I would rather avoid using another proxy if at all possible. So, is it possible to connect to a compatible SIP server using SIP over web-sockets then make a call from this user agent to another that does not support SIP over web-sockets without using a gateway?
You are right, SIP over Websockets is a draft, not specification. And I do not know many SIP vendors who support this draft.
Possible solution is truly websocket-SIP gateway. For example Flashphoner Web Call Server is implemented as a gateway which works through websockets with browser and works via SIP(TCP and UDP) with SIP servers. Therefore it is compatible with any server that supports RFC3261 - standard SIP specification.
Brief signaling scheme is:
Browser - [Websockets] - Web Call Server - [SIP TCP, UDP] - any SIP Server
Brief streaming scheme:
Browser - [WebRTC = SRTP, DTLS, ICE, STUN ] - Web Call Server - [RTP UDP] - any SIP/RTP Server
An alternate way is to use kamailio as it understands both sip and ws sip .
when you say "implementing a sip server " is it a simple registrar or proxy server or you want cal control logic / presence other features ?
In all cases kamailio fulfills all requirements , plus it is opensource .
Mobicents SIP Servlets Example already provides a B2BUA Application taking care of that for you. The Media is peer to peer (or through a TURN Relay Server) but if you need to bridge to a Media Server, you can indeed patch the SDP Body to make the media of each party go through the Media Server (pending it supports Media related codecs from WebRTC, DTLS-SRTP etc) to add conferencing, recording type of capabilities.

Enforce using HTTP proxy globally

We have a task here - to redirect all http traffic from all applications running on computers running Win7 and Win8 to some proxy. So the only thing comes to my mind is to use WFP callout driver to inspect outgoing packets and modify them accordingly. So question is this - is it the only way to enforce using HTTP proxy globally for all applications running on Windows computer?
thanks.

Can I open a websocket connection to a local server running on an arbitrary port?

I have a local server outputting my real-time home sensor data, and I want to visualize it in my browser.
My question is, can I use a websocket to open the connection from my browser to the local server? How would I go about doing that?
The local server runs on a non-http designated port number, and I can't change that.
Yes and no.
No:
WebSockets are not raw TCP connections. They have an HTTP compatible handshake (for both security and compatibility with existing servers) and have some minimal framing for each packet to make WebSockets a message based protocol. Also, the current WebSocket API and protocol that exists in browsers as of today do not directly support binary data messages. They only UTF-8 encoded payloads.
Yes:
You can use websockify to proxy a WebSockets connection to a raw binary TCP server. websockify is a python proxy/bridge that has binary support and also includes a javascript library to make interacting with it easier. In addition, websockify includes the web-socket-js fallback/polyfill (implemented in Flash) for browser that do not have native WebSockets support. The downside is that you have to run websockify somewhere (either on the client system, the server system, or some other system). Also, websockify is Linux/UNIX only for now. On the plus side, websockify has a special mode that you can use to launch and wrap an existing service.
Disclaimer: I made websockify.

Why don't current websocket client implementations support proxies?

A Web Socket detects the presence of a proxy server and automatically sets up a tunnel to pass through the proxy. The tunnel is established by issuing an HTTP CONNECT statement to the proxy server, which requests for the proxy server to open a TCP/IP connection to a specific host and port. Once the tunnel is set up, communication can flow unimpeded through the proxy. Since HTTP/S works in a similar fashion, secure Web Sockets over SSL can leverage the same HTTP CONNECT technique. [1]
OK, sounds useful! But, in the client implementations I've seen thus far (Go [2], Java [3]) I do not see anything related to proxy detection.
Am I missing something or are these implementations just young? I know WebSockets is extremely new and client implementations may be equally young and immature. I just want to know if I'm missing something about proxy detection and handling.
[1] http://www.kaazing.org/confluence/display/KAAZING/What+is+an+HTML+5+WebSocket
[2] http://golang.org/src/pkg/websocket/client.go
[3] http://github.com/adamac/Java-WebSocket-client/raw/master/src/com/sixfire/websocket/WebSocket.java
Let me try to explain the different success rates you may have encountered. While the HTML5 Web Socket protocol itself is unaware of proxy servers and firewalls, it features an HTTP-compatible handshake so that HTTP servers can share their default HTTP and HTTPS ports (80 and 443) with a Web Sockets gateway or server.
The Web Socket protocol defines a ws:// and wss:// prefix to indicate a WebSocket and a WebSocket Secure connection, respectively. Both schemes use an HTTP upgrade mechanism to upgrade to the Web Socket protocol. Some proxy servers are harmless and work fine with Web Sockets; others will prevent Web Sockets from working correctly, causing the connection to fail. In some cases additional proxy server configuration may be required, and certain proxy servers may need to be upgraded to support Web Sockets.
If unencrypted WebSocket traffic flows through an explicit or a transparent proxy server on its way the WebSocket server, then, whether or not the proxy server behaves as it should, the connection is almost certainly bound to fail today (in the future, proxy servers may become Web Socket aware). Therefore, unencrypted WebSocket connections should be used only in the simplest topologies.
If encrypted WebSocket connection is used, then the use of Transport Layer Security (TLS) in the Web Sockets Secure connection ensures that an HTTP CONNECT command is issued when the browser is configured to use an explicit proxy server. This sets up a tunnel, which provides low-level end-to-end TCP communication through the HTTP proxy, between the Web Sockets Secure client and the WebSocket server. In the case of transparent proxy servers, the browser is unaware of the proxy server, so no HTTP CONNECT is sent. However, since the wire traffic is encrypted, intermediate transparent proxy servers may simply allow the encrypted traffic through, so there is a much better chance that the WebSocket connection will succeed if Web Sockets Secure is used. Using encryption, of course, is not free, but often provides the highest success rate.
One way to see it in action is to download and install the Kaazing WebSocket Gateway--a highly optimized, proxy-aware WebSocket gateway, which provides native WebSocket support as well as a full emulation of the standard for older browsers.
The answer is that these clients simply do not support proxies.
-Occam
The communication channel is already established by the time the WebSocket protocol enters the scene. The WebSocket is built on top of TCP and HTTP so you don't have to care about the things already done by these protocols, including proxies.
When a WebSocket connection is established it always starts with a HTTP/TCP connection which is later "upgraded" during the "handshake" phase of WebSocket. At this time the tunnel is established so the proxies are transparent, there's no need to care about them.
Regarding websocket clients and transparent proxies,
I think websocket client connections will fail most of the time for the following reasons (not tested):
If the connection is in clear, since the client does not know it is communicating with a http proxy server, it won't send the "CONNECT TO" instruction that turns the http proxy into a tcp proxy (needed for the client after the websocket handshake). It could work if the proxy supports natively websocket and handles the URL with the ws scheme differently than http.
If the connection is in SSL, the transparent proxy cannot know to which server it should connect to since it has decrypt the host name in the https request. It could by either generating a self-signed certificate on the fly (like for SSLStrip) or providing its own static certificate and decrypt the communication but if the client validates the server certificate it will fail (see https://serverfault.com/questions/369829/setting-up-a-transparent-ssl-proxy).
You mentioned Java proxies, and to respond to that I wanted to mention that Java-Websocket now supports proxies.
You can see the information about that here: http://github.com/TooTallNate/Java-WebSocket/issues/88
websocket-client, a Python package, supports proxies, at the very least over secure scheme wss:// as in that case proxy need no be aware of the traffic it forwards.
https://github.com/liris/websocket-client/commit/9f4cdb9ec982bfedb9270e883adab2e028bbd8e9

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