TCP Server sitting behind a proxy

[Jeethu Rao]

John,
That was a pretty hilarious and educative reply,
It is meant to run on the internet, so security 
does matter. No, I don't plan to leave a C 
compiler on the proxy machines. And yes, I'll be
writing the proxy app in C++ (Because it's quite
a lot simpler than the server, which is being 
written in Python).

The main design goal is flexibility. It's got to work with
Or without a proxy

 Client1
        \
         \
 Client2--o--Proxy/Firewall---Internet---Server
         /                   /|
        /                   /
 Client3                   /
                          /
Client4------------------/

(Shamelessly copied your ASCII art)

I'm pretty certain that even batman will have a hard time
breaking 256 bit Rijndael encrypted data (wrapped with
a checksum and a packet header(to prevent data corruption)

I could just wrap the whole thing in SOCKS5 or something like that,
But I believe the proxy should be aware of the protocol. That
adds to the security in a lot of ways.

The protocol is TCP, so my solution is to have the initiator of the
connection send a packet at the beginning of every connection, with
the intended IP and the port of the machine being connected into.

Thnx,

Jeethu Rao