Privoxy Allow IP Address Based on Dynamic DNS

Question

I want to use Privoxy hosted on my VPS as an HTTP proxy for when I will be travelling to China. However, I don't want just anyone to be able to use it.

I google'd around, and it doesn't look like HTTP proxies typically allow setting username/password protection, and there isn't any field to input this information in Firefox's settings anyway.

But, I think you can filter the people allowed to connect by IP. I will be travelling a lot, thus my IP will change a lot, so is there a way to filter the allowed connections by a dynamic DNS service. I could just update the IP through the DNS service, and then connect to the proxy.

Answer 1

There are a number of proxy solutions that use usernames/passwords (though these are usually commercial solutions such as Bluecoat/Blueshield). This is usually not done as part of the browser setting, but rather when you try to connect to it (it will usually prompt you). The specific proxy must implement SOCKS5 in order to perform authentication.

For privoxy you can set your server to only allow connections via SSH and secure that with username and password. Look at the answer from John Reese and David Goodwin here: http://commandline.org.uk/forum/topic/366/

I also did find a patch (not committed) for privoxy to implment authentication on the project page here: http://sourceforge.net/tracker/index.php?func=detail&aid=3027696&group_id=11118&atid=311118 and a method to add basic authentication passing here: http://hints.macworld.com/comment.php?mode=view&cid=19290

As far as the exact answer to your question. You could fiter by the hostname of your system that is being advertised by DynDns (or whatever dynamic dns service), so that the change in IP is automatically reflected at the proxy. It should work fairly well so long as there are no DNS poisoning attacks against you.