CS110 Assignment 7- HTTP Web Proxy and Cache Solution

Your penultimate CS110 assignment has you implement a multithreaded HTTP proxy and cache. An HTTP proxy is an intermediary that intercepts each and every HTTP request and (generally) forwards it on to the intended recipient. The servers direct their HTTP responses back to the proxy, which in turn passes them on to the client. In its purest form, the HTTP proxy is little more than a nosy network middleman that reads and propagates all incoming and outgoing HTTP activity.
Here’s the neat part, though. When HTTP requests and responses travel through a proxy, the proxy can control what gets passed along. The proxy might, for instance:
● block access to social media products—sites like Google Plus, Twitter, and LinkedIn.
● block access to large documents, like videos and high-definition images, so that slow networks don't become congested and interfere with lightweight applications like email and instant messaging.
● block access to all web sites hosted in Canada. You know, as payback for Justin Bieber.
● strip an HTTP request of all cookie and IP address information before forwarding it to the server as part of some larger effort to anonymize the client.
● intercept all requests for GIF, JPG, and PNG files and instead serve a proxy-stored image of your lovely CS110 lecturer.
● cache the HTTP responses to frequently requested, static resources that don’t change very often so it can respond to future HTTP requests for the same exact resources without involving the origin servers.
● redirect the user to an intermediate paywall to collect payment for wider access to the Internet, as some airport and coffee shop WiFi systems are known for.
Getting The Code
Go ahead and clone the mercurial repository we’ve set up for you by typing:
myth29> hg clone /usr/class/cs110/repos/assign7/$USER assign7
Compile often, test incrementally and almost as often as you compile, hgcommit so you don’t lose your work if someone accidentally crushes your laptop, and run /usr/class/cs110/tools/submit when you’re done.
If you descend into your assign7 directory, you'll notice a symlink called proxy_soln, which leads to a copy of the sample executable. You can run proxy_soln (and your own proxy) as you’d expect:
myth29> ./proxy_soln
Listening for all incoming traffic on port <port number>.
myth29> ./proxy_soln --port 12345 Listening for all incoming traffic on port 12345.
In isolation, proxy_soln doesn’t do very much. In order to see it work its magic, you should download and launch a web browser that allows you to appoint a proxy for just HTTP traffic. I’m recommending you download Firefox, because I’ve used it for three years now to specifically exercise proxy, and it has worked very well for me. Once you download and launch Firefox, you can configure it (on Macs) to connect to the Internet through proxy by launching Preferences from the Apple menu, selecting Advanced, selecting Network within Advanced, selecting Connection within Network, and then activating a manual proxy as I have in the screenshot on the right. (On Windows, proxy settings can be configured by selecting Tools → Options).
You should enter the myth machine you’re working on (and you should get in the habit of ssh’ing into the same exact myth machine for the next week so you don’t have to continually change these settings), and you should enter the port number that your proxy is listening to.
You can, of course, use whatever web browser you want to, but I’m recommending Firefox for a few reasons. Here are two of them:
● I suspect most of you don’t use Firefox by default, so you won’t need to manually toggle proxy settings on and off to surf the Internet using whatever browser it is you normally use. Firefox can be your CS110 browser for this assignment cycle, and Chrome, Safari, Internet Explorer or whatever it is you use normally can be your default.
● Some other browsers don’t allow you to configure browser-only proxy settings, but instead prompt you to configure computer-wide proxy settings for all HTTP traffic—for all browsers, Dropbox and/or iCloud synchronization, iTunes downloads, and so forth. You don’t want that level of interference.
If you’d like to start small and avoid the browser, you can use telnet from your own machine to talk HTTP with your proxy, like this (everything I type in is in bold, and everything sent back by the proxy running on myth14:12345 is italicized):
HTTP/1.1 301 Permanently Moved accept-ranges: bytes connection: close content-length: 0
location: https://xkcd.com/info.0.json retry-after: 0 server: Varnish via: 1.1 varnish x-cache: HIT x-cache-hits: 0
x-served-by: cache-sjc3138-SJC x-timer: S1495645338.478272,VS0,VE0
Connection closed by foreign host.$ telnet myth14.stanford.edu 12345 Trying 171.64.15.20...
Connected to myth29.stanford.edu.
Escape character is '^]'.
GET http://xkcd.com/info.0.json HTTP/1.1
Host: xkcd.com
HTTP/1.1 301 Permanently Moved accept-ranges: bytes connection: close content-length: 0
via: 1.1 varnish x-cache: HIT x-cache-hits: 0
x-served-by: cache-sjc3138-SJC x-timer: S1495645338.478272,VS0,VE0 Connection closed by foreign host.
(Note that after you enter Host: xkcd.com, you need to hit enter twice. In this case, the response is a valid one that says the official URL for the resource being fetched involved HTTPS instead of HTTP, but it's nonetheless a valid HTTP conversation. )
Implementing v1: Sequential proxy
Your final product should be a multithreaded HTTP proxy and cache that blocks access to certain domains. As with all nontrivial programs, we’re encouraging you to develop through a series of milestones instead of implementing everything in one extended, daredevil swoop. You’ll want to read and reread Sections 11.5 and 11.6 of your B&O textbook to ensure a basic understanding of the HTTP protocol.
For the v1 milestone, you shouldn’t worry about threads or caching. You should transform the initial code base into a sequential but otherwise legitimate proxy. The code you’re starting with responds to all HTTP requests with a placeholder status line consisting of an "HTTP/1.0" version string, a status code of 200, and a curt "OK" reason message. The response includes an equally curt payload announcing the client’s IP address. Once you’ve configured your browser so that all HTTP traffic is directed toward the relevant port of the myth machine you’re working on, go ahead and launch proxy and start visiting any and all web sites. Your proxy should at this point intercept every HTTP request and respond with this (with a different IP address, of course):

For the v1 milestone, you should upgrade the starter application to be a true proxy—an intermediary that ingests HTTP requests from the client, establishes connections to the origin servers (which are the machines for which the requests are actually intended), passes the HTTP requests on to the origin servers, waits for HTTP responses from these origin servers, and then passes those responses back to the clients. Once the v1 checkpoint has been implemented, your proxy application should basically be a busybody that intercepts HTTP requests and responses and passes them on to the intended recipients.
Each intercepted HTTP request is passed along to the origin server pretty much as is, save for three small changes.
● You should modify the intercepted request URL within the first line — the request line as it’s called — as needed so that when you forward it as part of the request, it includes only the path and not the protocol or the host. The request line of the intercepted HTTP request should look something like this:
GET http://news.yahoo.com/science/ HTTP/1.1
Of course, GET might be any one of the legitimate HTTP method names, the protocol might be HTTP/1.0 instead of HTTP/1.1, and the URL will be any one of a jillion URLs. But provided your browser is configured to direct all HTTP traffic through your proxy, the URLs are guaranteed to include the protocol (e.g. the leading "http://") and the host name (e.g. news.yahoo.com). The protocol and the host name are included whenever the request is directed to a proxy, because the proxy would otherwise have no clue where the forwarded HTTP request should go. When you do forward the HTTP request to the origin server, you need to strip the leading "http://" and the host name from the URL. For the specific example above, the proxy would need to forward the HTTP request on to news.yahoo.com, and the first line of that forwarded HTTP request would need to look like this:
GET /science/ HTTP/1.1
I’ve implemented the HTTPRequest class to manage this detail for you automatically (inspect the implementation of operator<< in request.cc and you’ll see), but you need to ensure that you don’t break this as you start modifying the code base, because you'll need to change the implementation of operator<< once you support proxy chaining for the final milestone.
● You should add a new request header entity named "x-forwarded-proto" and set its value to be "http". If "x-forwarded-proto" is already included in the request header, then simply add it again.
● You should add a new request header entity called "x-forwarded-for" and set its value to be the IP address of the requesting client. If "x-forwarded-for" is already present, then you should extend its value into a comma-separated chain of IP addresses the request has passed through before arriving at your proxy. (The IP address of the machine you’re directly hearing from would be appended to the end). Your reasons for adding these two new fields will become apparent later on, when you support proxy chaining.
Most of the code you write for your v1 milestone will be confined to request-handler.h and request-handler.cc files (although you’ll want to make a few changes to request.h/cc as well). The HTTPRequestHandler class you’re starting with has just one public method, with a placeholder implementation.
Once you’ve reached your v1 milestone, you’ll be the proud owner of a sequential (but otherwise fully functional) proxy. You should visit every popular web site imaginable to ensure the round-trip transactions pass through your proxy without impacting the functionality of the site (caveat: see the note below on sites that require login or are served up via HTTPS). Of course, you can expect the sites to load very slowly, since your proxy has this much parallelism: zero. For the moment, however, concern yourself with the networking and the proxy’s core functionality, and worry about improving application throughput in later milestones.
Implementing v2: Sequential proxy with blacklisting, caching
Once you’ve built v1, you’ll have constructed a genuine HTTP proxy. In practice, proxies are used to either block access to certain web sites, cache static resources that rarely change so they can be served up more quickly, or both.
Why block access to certain web sites? There are several reasons, and here are a few:
● Law firms, for example, don’t want their attorneys surfing Yahoo, AOL, or Facebook when they should be working and billing clients.
● Parents don’t want their kids to accidentally trip across a certain type of web site.
● Some governments forbid their citizens to visit Facebook, Twitter, The New York Times, and other media sites.
● Microsoft IT might "encourage" its employees to use Bing by blocking access to other search engines during lockdown periods when a new Bing feature is being tested internally.
Why should the proxy maintain copies of static resources (like images and JavaScript files)? Here are two reasons:
● The operative adjective here is static. A large fraction of HTTP responses are dynamically generated—after all, the majority of your Facebook, LinkedIn, Google Plus, Flickr, and Instagram feeds are constantly updated—sometimes every few minutes. HTTP responses providing dynamically generated content should never be cached, and the HTTP response headers are very clear about that. But some responses—those serving images, JavaScript files, and CSS files, for instance—are the same for all clients, and stay the same for several hours, days, weeks, months—even years! An HTTP response serving static content usually includes information in its header stating the entire thing is cacheable. Your browser uses this information to keep copies of cacheable documents, and your proxy can too.
● Along the same lines, if a static resource—the omnipresent Google logo, for instance—rarely changes, why should a proxy repeatedly fetch the same image over and over again an unbounded number of times? It’s true that browsers won’t even bother issuing a request for something in its own cache, but users clear their browser caches from time to time (in fact, you should clear it very, very often while testing), and some HTTP clients aren’t savvy enough to cache anything at all. By maintaining its own cache, your proxy can drastically reduce network traffic by serving up cached copies when it knows those copies would be exact replicas of what it’d otherwise get from the origin servers. In practice, web proxies are on the same local area network, so if requests for static content don't need to leave the LAN, then it’s a win for all parties.
In spite of the long-winded defense of why caching and blacklisting are reasonable features, incorporating support for each is relatively straightforward, provided you confine your changes to the request-handler.h and .cc files. In particular, you should just add two private instance variables—one of type HTTPBlacklist, and a second of type HTTPCache to HTTPRequestHandler.
Once you do that, you should do this:
● Update the HTTPRequestHandler constructor to construct the embedded HTTPBlacklist, which itself should be constructed from information inside the "blocked-domains.txt" file. The implementation of HTTPBlacklist relies on the C++11 regex class, and you’re welcome to read up on the regular expression support they provide. You’re also welcome to ignore the blacklist.cc file altogether and just use it.
Your HTTPRequestHandler class would normally forward all requests to the relevant original servers without hesitation. But, if your request handler notices the origin server matches one of the regexes in the HTTPBlacklist-managed set of verboten domains, you should punt on the forward and immediately respond with a status code of 403 and a payload of "Forbidden Content". Whenever you have to respond with your own HTML documents (as opposed to ones generated by the origin servers), just go with a protocol of HTTP/1.0.
● You should update the HTTPRequestHandler to check the cache to see if you’ve stored a copy of a previously generated response for the same request. The HTTPCache class you’ve been given can be used to see if a valid cache entry exists, repackage a cache entry into HTTPResponse form, examine an origin-server-provided HTTPResponse to see if it’s cacheable, create new cache entries, and delete expired ones. The current implementation of HTTPCache can be used as is—at least for this milestone. It uses a combination of HTTP response hashing and timestamps to name the cache entries, and the naming schemes can be gleaned from a quick gander through the cache.cc file.
Your to-do item for caching? Before passing the HTTP request on to the origin server, you should check to see if a valid cache entry exist. If it does, just return a copy of it— verbatim!—without bothering to forward the HTTP request. If it does not, then you should forward the request as you would have otherwise. If the HTTP response identifies itself as cacheable, then you should cache a copy before propagating it along to the client.
What’s cacheable? The code I’ve given you makes some decisions—technically off specification, but good enough for our purposes—and implements pretty much everything. In a nutshell, an HTTP response is cacheable if the HTTP request method was "GET", the response status code was 200, and the response header was clear that the response is cacheable and can be cached for a reasonably long period of time. You can inspect some of the HTTPCache method implementations to see the decisions I’ve made for you, or you can just ignore the implementations for the time being and use the HTTPCache as an off-the-shelf.
Once you’ve hit v2, you should once again pelt your proxy with oodles of requests to ensure it still works as before, save for some obvious differences. Web sites matching domain regexes listed in blocked-domains.txt should be shot down with a 403, and you should confirm your proxy's cache grows to store a good number of documents, sparing the larger Internet from a good amount of superfluous network activity. (Again, to test the caching part, make sure you clear your browser’s cache a whole bunch.)
Implementing v3: Concurrent proxy with blacklisting and caching
You’ve implemented your HTTPRequestHandler class to proxy, block, and cache, but you have yet to work in any multithreading magic. For precisely the same reasons threading worked out so well with your RSS News Feed Aggregator, threading will work miracles when implanted into your proxy. Virtually all of the multithreading you add will be confined to the scheduler.h and scheduler.cc files. These two files will ultimately define and implement an über-sophisticated HTTPProxyScheduler class, which is responsible for maintaining a list of socket/IP-address pairs to be handled in FIFO fashion by a limited number of threads.
One extreme solution might just spawn a separate thread within every single call to scheduleRequest, so that its implementation would go from this:
void HTTPProxyScheduler::scheduleRequest(int connectionfd,
const string& clientIPAddress) {
handler.serviceRequest(make_pair(connectionfd, clientIPAddress));
}
to this:
void HTTPProxyScheduler::scheduleRequest(int connectionfd,
const string& clientIPAddress) {
thread t([this](const pair<int, string>& connection) {
handler.serviceRequest(connection);
}, make_pair(connectionfd, clientIPAddress));
t.detach();
}
While the above approach succeeds in getting the request off of the main thread, it doesn’t limit the number of threads that can be running at any one time. If your proxy were to receive hundreds of requests in the course of a few seconds—in practice, a very real possibility—the above would create hundreds of threads in the course of those few seconds, and that would be bad. Should the proxy endure an extended burst of incoming traffic—scores of requests per second, sustained over several minutes or even hours, the above would create so many threads that the thread count would immediately exceed a thread-manager-defined maximum.
Fortunately, you built a ThreadPool class for Assignment 6, which is exactly what you want here. I’ve included the thread-pool.h file in the assign7 repositories, and I’ve updated the Makefile to link against my working solution of the ThreadPool class. You should leverage a single ThreadPool with 64 worker threads, and use that to elevate your sequential proxy to a multithreaded one. Given a properly working ThreadPool, going from sequential to concurrent is actually not very much work at all.
Here are some basic requirements:
● You must, of course, ensure there are no race conditions—specifically, that no two threads are trying to search for, access, create, or otherwise manipulate the same cache entry at any one moment.
● You can have at most one open connection for any given request. If two threads are trying to fetch the same document (e.g. the HTTP requests are precisely the same), then one thread must go through the entire examine-cache/fetch-if-not-present/add-cache-entry transaction before the second thread can even look at the cache to see if it’s there.
You should not lock down the entire cache with a single mutex for all requests, as that introduces a huge bottleneck into the mix, allows at most one open network connection at a time, and renders your multithreaded application to be essentially sequential. You could take the map<string, unique_ptr<mutex>> approach that the implementation of oslock and osunlock takes (you probably took that approach in Assignment 5 to manage per-server connection limits as well), but that solution doesn’t scale for real proxies, which run uninterrupted for months at a time and cache millions of documents.
I’ve ensured that the starting code base relies on thread safe versions of functions
(gethostbyname_r instead of gethostbyname, readdir_r instead of readdir), so you don’t have to worry about any of that. (Note your assign7 repo includes client-socket.[h/cc], updated to use gethostbyname_r.)
Implementing v4: Concurrent proxy with blacklisting, caching, and proxy chaining
Some proxies elect to forward their requests not to the origin servers, but instead to secondary proxies. Chaining proxies makes it possible to more fully conceal your web surfing activity, particularly if you pass through proxies that pledge to anonymize your IP address, cookie jar, etc. A proxied proxy might even have more noble intentions—to simply rely on the services of an existing proxy while providing a few more—better caching, custom blacklisting, and so forth—to the client.
The proxy_soln we’ve supplied you allows for a secondary proxy to be specified, as with this:
myth29> ./proxy_soln --proxy-server myth12.stanford.edu Listening for all incoming traffic on port 43383.
Requests will be directed toward another proxy at myth12.stanford.edu:43383.
Provided a second proxy is running on myth12 and listening to port 43383, the proxy running on myth29 would forward all HTTP requests—unmodified, save for the updates to the "x-forwarded-proto" and "x-forwarded-for" header fields—on to the proxy running on myth12:43383, which for all we know forwards to another proxy!
We actually don’t require that the secondary proxy be listening on the same port number, so something like this might be a legal chain:
myth29> ./proxy_soln --proxy-server myth12.stanford.edu --proxy-port 12345 Listening for all incoming traffic on port 43383.
Requests will be directed toward another proxy at myth12.stanford.edu:12345.
In that case, the myth29:43383 proxy would forward all requests to the proxy that’s presumably listening to port 12345 on myth12.stanford.edu. (If the --proxy--port option isn’t specified, then the proxy assumes the same port number it’s using is used by the secondary.)
The HTTPProxy class we’ve given you already knows how to parse these additional
--proxy-server and --proxy-port flags, but it doesn’t do anything with them. You’re to update the hierarchy of classes to allow for the possibility that a (or several) secondary proxy is being used, and if so, to forward all requests (as is, except for the modifications to the "x-forwarded-proto" and "x-forwarded-for" headers) on to the secondary proxy. This’ll require you to extend the signatures of many methods and/or add methods to the hierarchy of classes to allow for the possibility that requests will be forwarded to another proxy instead of the origin servers. If you notice a chained set of proxy IP addresses that lead to a cycle (even if the port numbers are different), you should respond with a status code of 504.
For fun, we’re supplying a python script called run-proxy-farm.py, which can be used to manage a farm of proxies that forward to each other. One you have proxy chaining implemented, open the python script, update the HOSTS variable to be a list of one or more myth machine numbers (e.g. HOSTS = [14, 15, 18, 2]) to get a daisy chain of proxy processes running on the different hosts. Note that you cannot run the python script to test for cycles in chains; you will have to set that up manually. (If you want to use run-proxy-farm.py to test for cycles, you'll need to modify it to support that).
Additional Tidbits
● You should absolutely add logging code and publish it to standard out. We won’t be autograding the logging portion of this assignment, but you should still add tons of logging so that you can confirm your proxy application is actually moving and getting stuff done. (For obvious reasons, your logging code should be thread-safe).
● Your proxy will intercept all HTTP traffic, but it won’t even see any HTTPS traffic. As your surf the net, note whether the site switches over to HTTPS, lest you think your proxy isn’t actually doing anything, when in fact it's not because it’s not supposed to be. You’ll probably want to avoid web sites like www.google.com , www.facebook.com, and www.yahoo.com while testing your proxy, since they’re all HTTPS as far as I can tell.
● Your proxy application maintains its cache in a subdirectory of your home directory called .proxy-cache-myth<num>. The accumulation of all cache entries might very well amount to megabytes of data over the course of the next week, so you should delete that .proxy-cache-myth<num> by invoking your proxy with the --clear-cache flag.
● If you want to impose a maximum time-to-live value on all cacheable responses, you can invoke your proxy with --max-age <max-ttl>. If you go with a 0, then the cache is turned off completely. If you go with a number like 10, then that would means that cacheable items can only live in the cache for 10 seconds before they're considered invalid.
● Note that responses to HEAD requests—as opposed to responses to GET and POST requests— never include a payload, even if the response header includes a content length. Make sure you circumvent the call to ingestPayload for HEAD requests, else your proxy will get held up once the first HEAD request is intercepted.
● Your proxy application should, in theory, run until you explicitly quit by pressing ctrl-C. A real proxy would be polite enough to wait until all outstanding proxy requests have been handled, and it would also engage in a bidirectional rendezvous with the scheduler, allowing it the opportunity to bring down the ThreadPool a little more gracefully. You don’t need to worry about this at all—just kill the proxy application without regard for any cleanup.
I hope you enjoy the assignment as much as I’ve enjoyed developing it. It’s genuinely thrilling to know that all of you can implement something as sophisticated as an industrial-strength proxy, particularly in light of the fact that many of you took CS106B and CS106X less than a year ago.