Proxies

Proxies are intermediary servers that act on behalf of a client, relaying requests to and from destination servers. By handling traffic, a proxy can hide the client's IP address, apply access controls, perform content caching, and modify or monitor data in transit. Proxies are commonly described as forward proxies or reverse proxies. A forward proxy sits between a client and the wider internet, while a reverse proxy sits in front of one or more servers and handles requests from external clients.

Common proxy types include HTTP/HTTPS proxies, which operate at the application layer for web traffic; and SOCKS proxies, which work at a lower level and can support multiple protocols. Transparent proxies do not require configuration changes on the client side. Proxies may be deployed as data center or residential services and may rotate IPs to reduce reuse. A reverse proxy often performs load balancing, TLS termination, and web application firewall duties, and may also cache responses to improve performance.

Use cases include privacy enhancement, access control and content filtering in organizations, load balancing and TLS offloading for web services, and support for web scraping or geolocation testing. Proxy use can raise privacy and legal concerns, as misconfiguration or reliance on untrustworthy providers may reveal data or logs. Websites can detect proxy traffic and block or challenge it; performance and security depend on the proxy’s configuration and trustworthiness.