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2023

GOST.PLUS — Public Reverse Proxy Service

The reverse proxy tunnel is one of the major new features in GOST, and a very important one. With reverse proxy and intranet penetration, you can easily expose internal web services to the public network for access anytime, anywhere.

To test this feature more comprehensively and provide a quick way for users needing temporary public access to internal services, we launched the GOST.PLUS public reverse proxy test service. This service is open to all users without registration.

  • in Serial
  • 15 min read

Serial Port Redirector

Serial ports are largely absent from modern personal computers, but can still be found on industrial devices and embedded systems. Since serial communication differs significantly from TCP/IP, debugging and analyzing serial-based protocols requires different approaches.

GOST added serial port redirector functionality after v3.0.0-rc8. This enables forwarding local serial port data to a TCP service, or TCP service data to a local serial port, or even forwarding between remote serial ports. Serial forwarding enables two use cases: remote serial communication and serial data monitoring.

Reverse Proxy Tunnel in Practice

The previous post introduced reverse proxy and intranet penetration concepts. This post demonstrates practical use of the reverse proxy tunnel through concrete examples.

A reverse proxy tunnel combines reverse proxy with intranet penetration. These two concepts aren't inherently linked — reverse proxy can function without intranet penetration, and intranet penetration isn't solely for reverse proxy. However, many scenarios require combining them. For example, home or corporate networks may lack a public IP, making direct public access impossible — intranet penetration via a public IP server provides indirect access to intranet services.

Reverse Proxy and Intranet Penetration

Reverse proxy is a type of proxy service. In common proxy services like HTTP/SOCKS5 proxies, the proxy targets the client — the proxy acts on behalf of the client to connect to the target server. In reverse proxy, the proxy targets the server. This is why HTTP/SOCKS5 proxies are also called forward proxies. The main difference is that in forward proxy, the client knows about the proxy, while in reverse proxy, the client (and even the server) may not know about the proxy — to the client, the proxy appears to be the actual service being accessed.

From a certain perspective, reverse proxy and port forwarding are similar — both create a mapping between two ports, forwarding data from one to another. However, reverse proxy uses the forwarded data for more precise control, while port forwarding typically doesn't depend on data content and is purely end-to-end forwarding. GOST's reverse proxy is built on port forwarding.