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Jader Dias
Asked: 2011-04-19 05:36:07 +0800 CST

Do transparent proxies have limitations comparing to non-transparent proxies?

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I wonder why would companies use non-transparent proxies when the transparent ones seems better to me.

proxy transparent-proxy

3 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    One big disadvantage to using a transparent proxy is that you're unable to force users to authenticate prior to gaining access without resorting to something more complex like a captive portal:

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Captive_portal

    You then risk breaking lots of tools that have no problem running properly configured with a regular proxy, and force your users to actually use a browser even if their work does not require one.

    In a related vein, it's also more difficult to use ACLs per-user or per-group.

    If you're not interested in authenticating your users or using ACLs then you might be better off with a transparent proxy because of its ease of deploying (basically no configuration needed on the client), of course.

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  2. Transparent proxies are also less good at handling https - the two options are to use SNI (which requires a recent browser) which will give accurate domain information, which can be used for monitoring, blocking or kicking off some sort of MITM, and reverse-dns which is possibly accurate enough for monitoring and not much else.

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  3. Another one is that you can not bypass them. If your proxy is stuck or soemthing, the user can not just try to load a site without.

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