here. - Benjamin Lin
Contents
1. flash net package detail html ON b ae O H ee ee I R N _ 12 Adobe Getting started with the custom install badge https www adobe com devnet air articles badge_for_air ht ml 13 Discussion of our project scope with Abbas Razzaghpanah a PhD student participating in the Internet Censorship Lab Friday April 03 2015 14 Flex https www adobe com products flex html 15 https en wikipedia org wiki JSON 16 Form based File Upload in HTML https tools ietf org html rfc 1867 17 https en wikipedia org wiki Representational_state_transfer2. see the HTTP status code the round trip time RTT and the status for this result to be uploaded in the grid on the left of the Result Panel after clicking the record in the grid he will further see the HTML content of the website on the right of the panel as shown in Figure 7 E ICFlash2 20e a F le lemme So HTTP X Test www google com lt Idoctype html gt lt html itemscope itemtype http schema org WebPage lang en gt lt head gt lt meta content Search the world s information including webpages images videos and more Google has many special features to help you find exactly what you re looking for name description gt lt meta content noodp name robots gt lt meta content images google_favicon_128 png itemprop image gt lt title gt Google lt Hitle gt lt script gt function window google kEl VWdOVaySO XHsQTBoYGQCA KEXPI 3700277 3700366 40240 23 4026 111 4029370 4029815 4030092 4031182 4031804 4032409 4032500 4032642 4032644 40 32678 4032711 4033129 4033161 4033189 4033 L2 http www google com Upload Clear https 130 245 64 107 8082 Figure 7 Result of an HTTP GET functionality 5 3 2 Result of an DNS Query Functionality Similarly if the user inputs a site URL selects DNS in the dropdown menu and then clicks Test button he will see the RTT to run this DNS query and its uploading sta
3. ICFlash Web based Network Measurement Using Adobe AIR CSE 534 Final Research Paper Jian Xu Benjamin X Lin Yang Sheng Fang Department of Computer Science Stony Brook University Stony Brook NY 11794 4400 jianxul xianlin yafang cs stonybrook edu http www ic sunysb edu stu xianlin cse534 ABSTRACT In order to help ICLab collect data for censorship related researches we develop ICFlash a network measurement application embedded on a webpage In specific CFlash allows an end user to issue HTTP GET requests or DNS queries to a remote web server and upload corresponding results to the Centinel Server We implement ICFlash by using Adobe AIR after investigating the feasibility of HTMLS JavaScript PHP Adobe Flash and AIR since AIR does not have the cross domain restriction We describe our design and implementation details provide the user manual and sample results of ICFlash application and outline the future work Key Words Cross Domain Adobe Flash Adobe AIR HTTP DNS Centinel Server 1 INTRODUCTION Currently the CLab application requires an end user to download the Centinel Client and run it locally to collect enough information for research purposes It requires too complex configurations and installation steps that may limit the number of users who are willing to participate in this censorship data collection program We create an Adobe AIR application named ICFlash for web browsers ena
4. S and BlackBerry Tablet OS HI Another advantage of Adobe AIR is allowing Adobe Flash and ActionScript code to construct applications that run outside of a web browser and behaves like a native application on supported platforms The most important point is that AIR does not have the cross domain restriction Consequently it allows us to send HTTP requests to arbitrary servers H According to the investigations on HTMLS JavaScript PHP Flash and AIR technologies we find that AIR is a suitable platform for our application because AIR does not have the cross domain restriction and also provides APIs accessing low level streams Therefore we decide to implement ICFlash using AIR 3 DESIGN Air Application Server Target Server 2 Send Request HTTP DNS 1 Download Air Application 3 Collect Response C 4 Send Collected Data cal User IC Lab Serwer Figure 1 Interaction between ICFlash and other systems Figure I presents an overview of ICFlash s workflow Initially the user visits our web server to download ICFlash application Next the user can use a specified URL or our predefined URL list to send HTTP GET requests or DNS queries to the target server After that ICFlash records the response from the server and presents the result to the user If the request is an HTTP GET the result will include HTTP response status code response URL the name value pairs of the HTTP header and HTML co
5. Similarly when the user clicks any result record in the grid he will see the detailed result on the right of the Result Panel The functionality of uploading results to the local Centinel Server is also available res www google com www facebook com www cnn com www msn com www baidu com Result js gt lt head gt lt meta content IE edge chrome 1 http Awww google com 200 109 ready http equiv X UA Compatible gt lt meta charset utf 8 gt lt meta content text html http http www facebook com 200 827 ready equiv Content Type gt lt meta name viewport 7 content width device width initial scale 1 0 hittp www cnn com 200 129 ready minimum scale 1 0 gt lt link href favicon ie9 ico http www msn com 200 194 ready rel Shortcut Icon type image x icon gt lt link href http i cdn turner com cnn e img 3 0 global misc apple touch icon png rel apple touch icon type image png gt lt meta http equiv refresh content 1800 url refresh 1 gt lt title gt Breaking News U S World Weather Entertainment amp Video News CNN coms title gt lt meta content homepage name section lt meta ontent 2014 0 2 19 g N http www baidu com 200 1010 ready Upload Clear https 130 245 64 107 8082 ompleted Figure 10 Result from executing a list of HTTP GET requests 6 FUTURE WORK Till now we have overcome the _ cross domain restriction completed the HTTP GET and DNS q
6. bling users to help CLab collect HTTP and DNS data by simply typing URL links and clicking buttons In order to implement these functions CFlash first issues an HTTP GET request or DNS query to the web server designated by the URL then it uploads the HTTP or DNS response to the Centinel Server In the rest of this paper we firstly review the background Section 2 technologies that may be used for ICFlash and briefly describe why we reach our decision of using Adobe AIR Next we introduce the design of our application Section 3 followed by its implementation Section 4 We present the prototype of CFlash in Section 5 discuss the future work in Section 6 and conclude in Section 7 2 BACKGROUND In this section we review several web technologies for their feasibility in ICFlash 2 1 HTMLS HTMLS5S is a core technology markup language of the Internet used for structuring and presenting content for the World Wide Web It is derived from HTML4 which was standardized in 1997 Comparing to HTML4 a great improvement of HTML5 is the support of the latest multimedia technology Some new features were designed to make it easy to include and handle multimedia and graphical content on the web without having to resort to proprietary plugins and APIs Additionally several technologies were applied in HTMLS5S to support specific features like WebSocket API to provide full duplex communication channels over a single TCP conne
7. ction So we can apply Websocket API to issue HTTP requests to servers While in this case in order to process successfully servers that accept the WebSocket protocol requests have to support the protocol by upgrading This is hardly practical in our project since we have to urge all the web servers to upgrade to support the Websocket protocol Therefore applying HTMLS5 with Websocket API is not practical in our project 2 2 JavaScript JavaScript is a language supported by all modern web browsers It complements HTML and CSS by providing client side scripting JavaScript is commonly used to change the document content control the browser window communicate asynchronously with the web server and do complex math calculations Consequently many web applications and games use JavaScript While JavaScript provides some APIs to communicate with servers it is restricted by the cross domain policy This policy does not permit sending requests to another website with a different domain name Because our application needs to send requests to other domains this technology is not suitable 2 3 PHP PHP is a server side scripting language designed for web development in which case PHP generally runs on a web server e g Apache Nginx etc PHP code can be mixed with HTML code to construct a dynamic webpage It is usually processed by a PHP interpreter which is often implemented on the web server side by a server native module o
8. front end technologies The source code is compiled into a Shockwave Flash file e SWF file SWF files can be embedded in web pages and they must be running on a system with Adobe Flash installed Flash provides certain APIs that do not exist in browsers These APIs include TCP streams and custom TCP requests which are crucial to our _ application implementation However Flash enforces certain security policies One of such is the cross domain policy The target server which the Flash application tries to access must grant permission to the domain where the Flash application resides by including a crossdomain xml file on its own server For example if a Flash application on www a com wants to access www b com www b com must include crossdomain xml on its root that grants permission to www a com This policy demonstrates a huge restriction on what we want to achieve which is to send requests to any domain And it is impractical for us to ask web administrators to grant our application access to their web servers Therefore we opt not to use Flash 2 5 Adobe AIR Adobe AIR supports the full Adobe Flash API so that it gains all the advantages of Flash In addition AIR provides an API named flash net dns for DNS queries and other APIs supporting file system integration and access to connected devices The AIR runtime supports installable applications on Windows OS X and mobile operating systems like Android iO
9. fying our project requirements and convenient deployment for instance to acquire user perspective accessibility to web servers Next we describe several key steps on how to realize the project for example how to send HTTP GET requests and DNS queries by using Adobe AIR APIs how to upload the corresponding results to the Centinel Server in JSON format etc We also demonstrate the user manual of how to install and use the ICFlash step by step Finally we look into the future work of ICFlash planning to give users more flexibility of customizing a list of URLs to test coordinate with the ICLab administrator for uploading testing results to the actual Centinel Server and promoting our ICFlash application to the volunteers who participate in ICLab s data collection program over the world 8 REFERENCES 1 The Internet Censorship Lab http www internetcensorshiplab com N a http en wikipedia org wiki HTMLS5 http en wikipedia org wiki WebSocket e WwW http en wikipedia org wiki JavaScript http en wikipedia org wiki PHP http en wikipedia org wiki LAMP_ software_bundle http en wikipedia org wiki MAMP 8 http en wikipedia org wiki LAMP_ software_bundle FWA MP 9 http help adobe com en_US ActionScript 3 0_Programming AS3 WS5b3ccc5 16d4fbf35 1e63e3d118a9b90204 7e3f html 10 https en wikipedia org wiki Adobe_AIR 11 http help adobe com en_US FlashPlatform reference action script 3
10. ning message in Figure 5 By clicking Install button he confirms his decision of installing Application Install i i i See nnn S Are you sure you want to install this application to your computer Publisher UNKNOWN Application project Install Cancel Installing applications may present a security risk to you and your computer Install only from sources that you trust Publisher Identity UNKNOWN The publisher of this application cannot be determined Syste Ac St UNRESTRICTED s This application may access your file system and the internet which may put your computer at risk Figure 5 Request uer confirmation Step 4 Then ICFlash asks the location where he wants to install it as shown in Figure 6 EJ Application Install o e as u I S project Installation Preferences Add shortcut icon to my desktop Start application after installation Installation Location C Program Files x86 Continue Cancel Figure 6 Installation Path Step 5 By clicking the Continue button the installation of ICFlash will start After the installation is finished the interface of ICFlash will pop up as shown in Figure 2 Then the user can click the Manual tab on the interface to start his testing 5 3 Result 5 3 1 Result of an HTTP GET Functionality After the user inputs a correct website URL selects HTTP in the dropdown menu and then clicks Test button he will
11. ntent If the request is a DNS query the result will contain one or more IP addresses for the requested domain name In both cases ICFlash will record the round trip time RTT Finally with the user s consent ICFlash sends the response data to the ICLab Centinel Servers for further analysis 4 IMPLEMENTATION 4 1 User Interface Our user interface is written in Flex Flex is an SDK for developing user interface for the Adobe Flash platform One advantage of Flex is to provide consistent user experience on all major browsers desktops and devices l Flex is based on XML technology so the code is easy to write and maintain An example of Flex component we used is the Datagrid which provides a multiple column table for displaying our result We add a row in the datagrid for each result we received In each row we show the original domain URL the status code the round trip time and the uploading status We also add an event listener to the datagrid to handle users interactions When the user clicks on a record in the datagrid the textbox on the right of the Result Panel will be updated to show details of that result record 4 2 Library In order to implement the function of sending HTTP GET requests we use the flash net API U from the Flash library We first build a URLRequest object which stores various parameters related to the HTTP request We set the method property to GET and the contentType to text html Then by
12. om the official Adobe site H Then we replace the AIR file with ours and modify the AIR version and the absolute URL to our AIR file Then we upload the whole folder containing Badge files to our server allowing users to test our application 5 PROTOTYPE 5 1 User Interface The user interface of ICFlash looks like Figure 2 c iT a a nes p HTTP Z Test status time uploaded Clear https 130 245 64 107 8082 Upload Figure 2 The user interface of CFlash 5 2 User Manual Step 1 The user needs to visit the webpage with ICFlash embedded as shown in Figure 3 This file shows how to embed an Adobe AIR Badge installer using the SWEObject embed method by Geoff Stearns Note This demo may not run properly from the local file system without modifying your security settings you should be prompted for this Please read all of the comments in this file and edit all of the parameters prior to deploying your badge Figure 3 The initial webpage to start ICFlash installation Step 2 The user clicks the Install Now button ICFlash asks the user whether or not he wants to open and run it as shown in Figure 4 Application Install iti a aa E Would you like to open or save this file File project air Type Application setup From www Starwavelin com Open Cancel Figure 4 Installation Prompt Step 3 The user will see the war
13. r a Common Gateway Interface CGI executable After the PHP code is interpreted and executed the web server sends the resulting output to its client usually in form of a part of the generated web page for example PHP code can generate a web page s HTML code an image or some other data According to the fact that PHP is a server side scripting language and can only be executed on the server side this makes us have to execute our program remotely Therefore servers instead of browsers will send the DNS HTTP requests that we embed in PHP programs Results will reflect the accessibility in servers perspective instead of users which is not what we intend to measure Alternatively we can achieve our goal by deploying LAMP like environment in client side e g LAMP 4 MAMP 1 WAMP where to let PHP scripts execute on but this approach breaches our principle that do not install heavy packages and complex configurations on the client side As a consequence PHP is not an ideal method for this project 2 4 Adobe Flash Adobe Flash is a common user side presentation platform in modern web applications Its common usage includes video player animation website navigation and complex application such as image editor It supports cross platforms running on Windows Mac OS and Linux It not only has a wide number of platform supports but also gains a huge user base Flash application is written in ActionScript with various
14. tus after he further clicks the record ICFlash will display the detailed DNS query results on the right of the Result Panel as shown in Figure 8 a ICFlash2 Manual Host googiacom i td 7 eee Result input status time _ uploaded _ Query string www google com www google com 74 125 226 49 www google com 1 ready www google com 74 125 226 52 www google com 74 125 226 48 www google com 74 125 226 50 www google com 74 125 226 51 Upload Clear https 130 245 64 107 8082 SUCCESS Figure 8 Result of an DNS query functionality By clicking the Clear button below the grids the user can always remove the current results displayed on the panel 5 3 3 Send Collected Results to a Local Centinel Server We have enabled the functionality for the user to upload the previously obtained result to a locally deployed Centinel Server in JSON format The user simply needs to click the result record shown in the grid modifies the IP Address Field to the right of the Clear button and then click Upload button After clicking the YES button to prompted security alerts he will see the uploading status of this result changes from ready to uploading then to done as shown in Figure 9 1 Simultaneously the local Centinel Server logs the result sent by the user as shown in Figure 9 2 If error occurs in the uploading process the status code for the result
15. uery modules the uploading to a locally deployed Centinel Server functionality and an extra feature of including a list of URLs for a user to test in batch For the future we plan to give users more flexibility by allowing them to upload a customized list of URLs to test Moreover we will contact the administrator of CLab Centinel Server Project to figure out the way of uploading users testing results to the actual Centinel Server instead of a locally deployed one Last but not the least we would coordinate with CLab to promote our ICFlash application to the volunteers who participated or are willing to participate in ICLab s data collection program over the world 7 CONCLUSION In order to get HTTP DNS information from users perspective via browsers we implement a web based application named ICFLash In this paper we first investigate the feasibility of several technologies such as HTML5S JavaScript PHP and Adobe Flash Then we eliminate those technologies as they are not able to satisfy our requirements For instance we cannot get user perspective information from servers executing PHP since not all servers support WebSocket protocol it is impossible to deploy a general application which sends WebSocket requests via HTMLS because JavaScript and Flash are subjected to the cross domain policy they are impractical for us to apply either Hence we decide to use Adobe AIR technology due to its capability of satis
16. using an instance of URLLoader our application sends an HTTP request to a remote server An event handler is used to asynchronously process the response We extract the data and then present it We use the flash net dns API to send DNS queries With a DNSResolver object we use the lookup method to resolve a domain name to obtain its IPv4 address In the event handler we process the result in the DNSResolverEvent object and display the data in our user interface 4 3 Result Uploading In order to let ICLab easily decode the result we choose the JSON encoding JSON is an open standard format that uses human readable text to transmit data objects consisting of attribute value pairs 151 Some examples we used include the attribute body paired with the result HTML body the attribute time paired with the round trip time and so on We then upload this JSON encoded result onto the Centinel Server Because the Centinel Server uses REST 7 architecture we can upload the result by sending an HTTP POST request We use the method similar to HTTP GET request detailed as mentioned previously except the method property being changed to POST instead of GET We embed the JSON string into the data property separated by boundaries as complied with the HTTP standard 4 4 Embedding Air into a Web Page We compile our code into an AIR installer and then deploy it to our current server We use a collection of sample html files named Badge fr
17. would display error as shown in Figure 9 3 eee e o l a ICFlash2 Manual Host www google com Result www google com 74 125 226 52 www google com 2 done www google com 74 125 226 48 www google com 74 125 226 50 www google com 74 125 226 49 www google com 74 125 226 51 Upload Clear https 130 245 65 164 8082 IS C ss Figure 9 1 A successful result uploading from the user side uploaded uploading time 2 status body Query string www google com n result object args www goog l e com www google com 74 125 226 48 Www goog www google com 74 125 226 49 WWW 125 226 51 extra status SUCCESS ver error input www google com Figure 9 2 The corresponding DNS query result on the server side _ Auto Manual Query string www google com www google com 173 194 123 112 www google com 173 194 123 115 www google com 173 194 123 114 www google com 173 194 123 116 www google com 173 194 123 113 https 130 245 64 107 8082 SUCCESS Figure 9 3 A result when uploading failed 5 3 4 Allow Users to Automatically Test a List of URLs Besides the required functionalities we have implemented as illustrated in Section 5 3 1 to 5 3 3 we have also implemented a feature to supply a list of URLs for a user to test in sequence as shown in Figure 10
Download Pdf Manuals
Related Search