Transparent Proxying

Transparent proxies allow all of your web traffic to filter through a proxy for security or monitoring purposes.

Using a transparent proxy has advantages over a traditional proxy setup for companies in that:

• There’s no maintenance for individual machines (‘I accidentally turned off the proxy’)
• There’s no additional setup for new users
• You don’t have to rely on the OS/browser being able to find the proxy via a script

The only real disadvantage is that there is no way to get around a transparent proxy – if you need to directly access the web without the proxy jumping in the middle, you can’t (easily).

Squid, among other things, is often used as a transparent proxy.

I’ll discuss more about Squid in a future article.