The things learned from this session:

• A web proxy acts as a gateway between us and the Internet. It offers a high level of privacy as it has the ability to provide anonymity. Other major functionalities of web proxy include caching, URI filtering, content filtering, and distributed caching.
• There are three types of web proxies: forward, reverse, and tunneling proxy.
  • Forward proxy: it is a type of proxy that offers services to a client or a group of clients. It hides the identities of the clients. It processes all outbound web requests from internal.
  • Reverse proxy: it is the opposite of forward proxy. It hides the identities of the servers.   It’s use cases are load balancing, cache static content, and compression. Load balancing   refers to the distribution of load to several web servers. Cache static content means caching static content like web pages, videos, pictures, etc. to reduce the load of web server and hence, the loading time. Compression means speeding up the load time through the means of compressing and optimizing the content.
  • Tunneling proxy: it means transferring encapsulated data through public or private network. Data is usually sent via encrypted connection such as SSH or VPN.
• Several types of evidences are persistent, volatile, and off-system. Persistent evidence may include history of all http/https traffic, web proxy configuration files, etc. Volatile evidence refers to cached content that is stored in volatile memory such as RAM, etc. Off-system evidence means evidence coming from centralized logging and reporting.