WebKnock.org Single Packet Authorization Proxy
10 October, 2011
Vasilis Mavroudis has developed a web proxy called WebKnock.org that allows anyone to generate an fwknop SPA packet on their behalf with just a web browser. Although fwknop client portability has improved quite a bit in anticipation of the upcoming fwknop-2.0 release, it is a nice addition to the SPA world to not need the fwknop client installed at all. There are probably several platforms where the native client might not function but can run a web browser.Using the webknock.org proxy requires that the user provide the SPA key over SSL to webknock.org, but this is a necessary step in exchange for not having to install the fwknop client. As of this writing, SPA via gpg keys is not yet supported, but there are plans to support this in the future. All requests to generate an SPA packet are protected by a captcha.
Behind the scenes, webknock.org executes the fwknop client on behalf of users, and Vasilis informed me that he's using the latest client code (written in C) instead of the older perl client. This is good since all recent development is done on the C version of fwknop in order to make it as small and lightweight as possible.
The service is free, and will hopefully be open-sourced at some point as well. If there are any issues, please either email me or open a ticket on the fwknop github interface. Here is a screenshot of the current webknock.org site:
