Shanto Roy

I Explore Research, Tech, Travel, and Business. PhD Student @UHCS.

3 minute read

In our previous two posts, we have coded our reverse proxy server and the regular server-side script of a server from the server pool.

In this post, we will code our client-side script that will send the following packets to the reverse proxy server. Note that, the user/client does not know which server is going to process the user data. A client can only knows about the reverse proxy server and sends data to the reverse proxy thereby. More details are available in the first post.

Communication packet

Each client sends json-alike data (stored in a file) to the reverse proxy server. Here is an example packet.

{
 "type": 0, // 0 is a message from a client to a server
 "srcid": 999, // source (client) id
 "privPoliId": 999, // destination server’s privacy policy
 "payloadsize": 999, // payload size
 "payload": "xyz" // payload
}

Code in Python

Used Modules

We are going to use only the following modules (description already discussed in the previous two posts).

import socket 
import hashlib
import json
import sys

Available Input Arguments

We need to provide three input arguments while running the script.

  • id $\rightarrow$ client ID
  • revproc $\rightarrow$ reverse proxy listening port
  • pkt $\rightarrow$ packet file name (stores the packet data) 
    def option_check():
  global args 

  # all available argument options
  avail_options = ["-id", "-revproc", "-pkt"]

  # receive user given options
  options = [opt for opt in sys.argv[1:] if opt.startswith("-")]

  # receive user given arguments
  args = [arg for arg in sys.argv[1:] if not arg.startswith("-")]

  # raise error if user given option is wrong
  for i in options:
      if i not in avail_options:
          raise SystemExit(f"Usage: {sys.argv[0]} (-id & -revproc & -pkt) <argument>...")

  # raise error if not all options or arguments are available
  if len(options) != 3 or len(args) != 3:
      raise SystemExit(f"Usage: {sys.argv[0]} (-id & -revproc & -pkt) <argument>...")

Function to read data from the files

This function is straight-forward. It just opens the file and returns the read data.

def read_json(filename):
    with open(filename) as f:
        data = json.load(f)
    return data

Main function

Now, we establish a socket communication with the reverse proxy server. Feel free to change your hostname if it is not the localhost. You can bind port address with IP address as well instead of names.

First the client reads the packet file and sends read data to the reverse proxy. Then it waits for the reverse proxy to return processed (hashed) data. On receiving the processed data, the client matches the hash calculation itself and be sure if the processed payload data is correct.

if __name__ == "__main__":
    option_check()
    server_name = 'localhost'
    # server_name = 'ec2-3-21-114-31.us-east-2.compute.amazonaws.com'
    server_port = int(args[1])
    client_socket = socket.socket(socket.AF_INET, socket.SOCK_STREAM)
    client_socket.connect((server_name,server_port))

    # Use while loop for continuous connection
    # while True:
    with open(args[2]) as f:
        send_msg = json.load(f)
    print("Sending message", send_msg["payload"], "to privacy policy", send_msg["privPoliId"],\
                        "through reverse proxy running on port", args[1])
    client_socket.send(json.dumps(send_msg).encode())
    recv_msg = client_socket.recv(2048).decode()
    recv_msg = json.loads(recv_msg)
    # print (">> ", recv_msg)
    hashed_sent = hashlib.sha1(send_msg["payload"].encode()).hexdigest()
    print ("Receiving a response from the server payload:", recv_msg["payload"])

    if hashed_sent == recv_msg["payload"]:
        print ("Hash of payload is correct")
    else:
        print ("Hash of payload is not correct")

Coding the client part is a lot easier than coding the server or the reverse proxy. The entire code is available in the Github.

So, now we are done with coding all three scripts. In the next post, we will write an automation script in shell and check whether our round-robin-based load-balancing works fine in the reverse proxy.

The whole tutorial series is listed here:

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