VPN Gateway URL Mangling Offloading via HTTP Server Modification
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Solution Overview
Problem
The VPN gateway in virtual private networks (VPNs) faces a significant workload due to the computationally expensive task of URL mangling, which often requires specialized and expensive high-end computing machinery, necessitating a method to offload this task from the VPN gateway.
Innovation Solution
Offloading URL mangling from the VPN gateway to HTTP servers within the VPN by instructing them to perform URL modification through HTTP proxy requests, thereby distributing the workload among these servers.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Reliability
If the VPN gateway performs URL mangling operations, then external clients can access internal web servers through the VPN, but the VPN gateway's computational workload increases significantly requiring expensive high-end computing machinery
Solution Approach 1:
The patent extracts the URL mangling operation from the VPN gateway and relocates it to the internal web server. The web server now performs the URL modification locally before sending content to the gateway, eliminating the computational burden from the gateway while maintaining the functionality of external access to internal resources.
Solution Approach 2:
The patent introduces a new intermediary mechanism where the web server acts as a mediator that performs URL mangling. Instead of the gateway directly modifying URLs, the web server intercepts its own responses, modifies the URLs within the content, and then sends the modified content through the gateway to external clients.
2Adaptability or versatility
If the VPN gateway performs URL mangling on all responses, then all external clients can access internal resources, but the processing time and computational resources are significantly consumed
Solution Approach 1:
The patent applies preliminary action by having the web server perform URL mangling before the response leaves the internal network. The web server proactively modifies URLs in the content it generates, so that when the content reaches the gateway, the URL mangling work is already complete, eliminating additional processing time at the gateway.
3Reliability
If specialized high-end computing machinery is used for the VPN gateway to handle URL mangling, then URL modification can be performed reliably, but the system cost increases significantly
Solution Approach 1:
The patent extracts the computationally intensive URL mangling function from the VPN gateway and assigns it to the web server. This redistribution of functionality allows the gateway to be implemented with less expensive, more general-purpose hardware while the web server, which already has processing capabilities for generating web content, handles the additional URL modification task.
Solution Approach 2:
The web server serves itself by performing URL mangling on its own responses. Instead of relying on an external gateway to modify URLs, the web server autonomously modifies its own content before transmission, eliminating the need for expensive specialized gateway hardware.
Data Source
AI summary
A method of modifying network identifiers at data servers is disclosed. A virtual private network (VPN) gateway server generates a Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) request. The HTTP request not only requests data from a data server that is within a VPN, but also instructs the data server to modify (“mangle”) URLs that are contained within the requested data so that the URLs refer to the VPN gateway server. The VPN gateway server sends the HTTP request toward the data server. As a result, the data server modifies the URLs so that the VPN gateway server does not need to. When such a modified URLs is selected in a web browser, the web browser generates an HTTP request that is directed to the VPN gateway server's URL, which, unlike the unmodified URLs, can be resolved by domain name servers that are outside of the VPN.