The release of the Privoxy 4.2.0 proxy server has been published, designed for creating personal web content filters. With Privoxy, users can cut out advertisements, discard tracking cookies, remove pop-up dialogs, block the loading of third-party JavaScript code, and make necessary arbitrary changes to web pages. Privoxy supports installation on both local systems of individual users and servers to create a centralized content filtering infrastructure within a local network. The project's code is written in C and is distributed under the GPLv2+ license. Ready-made builds are available for Linux (deb) and Windows.
Among the advanced features of Privoxy, we can highlight: the ability to bind tags to change the behavior of filters depending on specific client and server HTTP headers; an HTTPS inspection mode that allows filtering of HTTPS requests and responses; use of regular expressions in configuration files; and the ability to replace animated GIFs with static images. Privoxy can be used to block ads and unwanted content on devices where it is not possible to install relevant browser add-ons.
Among the changes in the new release:
- In HTTPS inspection mode, the use of elliptic curve-based keys (SN_X9_62_prime256v1) instead of RSA for generating keys and certificates for sites is enabled by default.
- The ability to use different client tags for different clients operating on the same host has been implemented.
- A build option ‘--enable-acl-debugging’ has been added to provide extended ACL debugging capabilities.
- The efficiency of filter work has been enhanced by using separate linked lists for different types of filters.
- The built-in web interface has been updated to allow the addition and removal of external filters.
- Support for the mbedtls 2.x library and OpenSSL versions prior to 2.0 has been discontinued.
- A filter has been added for 'sourceforge' to hide the vibe encoding panel.
- Two security issues have been fixed (CVE identifiers not assigned):
- Buffer overflow in the parse_chunk_size() function, occurring when parsing the size of data blocks using 'Chunked Transfer Encoding' in HTTP/1.0.
- Stack overflow in the ssl_send_certificate_error() function due to saving the error message on the stack without accounting for its size.
Source: opennet.ru
