SECURE WEB TUNNELING

The boundary of an organization does not always coincide with its fire wall. A member of an organization that is outside the firewall may wis h to access internal Web services with the same ease and security that are common within the firewall. At the same time, the firewall should still be able to perform adequate access control, logging, and auditi ng. In this paper, we describe a new technique for secure Web tunnelin g, which permits the desired outside access to internal Web services. We argue that this technique is preferable to alternatives such as spe cial firewall configurations, IP tunneling, and reverse proxies. We de scribe an implementation of Web tunneling that relies mostly on common , off-the-shelf components. (C) 1998 Published by Elsevier Science B.V . All rights reserved.