A TCP Proxy in Perl

Several weeks ago my friend was in an airport in the Netherlands and he wanted to login into his server via ssh. It turned out that their public Internet had only ports 80 and 443 open so he couldn't do that. He asked me if I could proxy either port 80 or 443 to his server. Surely, I had a solution. I modified the tcp proxy server that I had written for my Turn any Linux computer into SOCKS5 proxy in one command article and ran this command on my server:

sudo ./tcp-proxy2.pl 443 friends_server.com:22

This proxied port 443 on my server to friends_server.com's ssh port. Now my friend could do:

ssh -p 443 my_server.com

and he got connected to his server. Mission accomplished!

Here is the code of tcp-proxy2.pl.

use warnings;
use strict;

use IO::Socket::INET;
use IO::Select;

my @allowed_ips = ('all', '10.10.10.5');
my $ioset = IO::Select->new;
my %socket_map;

my $debug = 1;

sub new_conn {
    my ($host, $port) = @_;
    return IO::Socket::INET->new(
        PeerAddr => $host,
        PeerPort => $port
    ) || die "Unable to connect to $host:$port: $!";
}

sub new_server {
    my ($host, $port) = @_;
    my $server = IO::Socket::INET->new(
        LocalAddr => $host,
        LocalPort => $port,
        ReuseAddr => 1,
        Listen    => 100
    ) || die "Unable to listen on $host:$port: $!";
}

sub new_connection {
    my $server = shift;
    my $remote_host = shift;
    my $remote_port = shift;

    my $client = $server->accept;
    my $client_ip = client_ip($client);

    unless (client_allowed($client)) {
        print "Connection from $client_ip denied.\n" if $debug;
        $client->close;
        return;
    }
    print "Connection from $client_ip accepted.\n" if $debug;

    my $remote = new_conn($remote_host, $remote_port);
    $ioset->add($client);
    $ioset->add($remote);

    $socket_map{$client} = $remote;
    $socket_map{$remote} = $client;
}

sub close_connection {
    my $client = shift;
    my $client_ip = client_ip($client);
    my $remote = $socket_map{$client};

    $ioset->remove($client);
    $ioset->remove($remote);

    delete $socket_map{$client};
    delete $socket_map{$remote};

    $client->close;
    $remote->close;

    print "Connection from $client_ip closed.\n" if $debug;
}

sub client_ip {
    my $client = shift;
    return inet_ntoa($client->sockaddr);
}

sub client_allowed {
    my $client = shift;
    my $client_ip = client_ip($client);
    return grep { $_ eq $client_ip || $_ eq 'all' } @allowed_ips;
}

die "Usage: $0 <local port> <remote_host:remote_port>" unless @ARGV == 2;

my $local_port = shift;
my ($remote_host, $remote_port) = split ':', shift();

print "Starting a server on 0.0.0.0:$local_port\n";
my $server = new_server('0.0.0.0', $local_port);
$ioset->add($server);

while (1) {
    for my $socket ($ioset->can_read) {
        if ($socket == $server) {
            new_connection($server, $remote_host, $remote_port);
        }
        else {
            next unless exists $socket_map{$socket};
            my $remote = $socket_map{$socket};
            my $buffer;
            my $read = $socket->sysread($buffer, 4096);
            if ($read) {
                $remote->syswrite($buffer);
            }
            else {
                close_connection($socket);
            }
        }
    }
}

Download tcp-proxy2.pl

Download link: catonmat.net/ftp/tcp-proxy2.pl

I also pushed the tcp-proxy2.pl to a new GitHub repository: tcp-proxy2.pl on GitHub. You can help me out by forking it and adding new features, such as making it a daemon, adding more command line switches and improved IP access control.

See you next time!