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COW (Climb Over the Wall) proxy

COW is a HTTP proxy to simplify bypassing the great firewall. It tries to automatically identify blocked websites and only use parent proxy for those sites.

Current version: 0.9.8 CHANGELOG Build Status

Features

  • As a HTTP proxy, can be used by mobile devices
  • Supports HTTP, SOCKS5, shadowsocks and COW itself as parent proxy
    • Supports simple load balancing between multiple parent proxies
  • Automatically identify blocked websites, only use parent proxy for those sites
  • Generate and serve PAC file for browser to bypass COW for best performance
    • Contain domains that can be directly accessed (recorded accoring to your visit history)

Quickstart

Install:

  • OS X, Linux (x86, ARM): Run the following command (also for update)

      curl -L git.io/cow | bash
    • All binaries are compiled on OS X, if ARM binary can't work, please download Go ARM and install from source.

  • Windows: download from the release page

  • If you are familiar with Go, run go get github.com/cyfdecyf/cow to install from source.

Modify configuration file ~/.cow/rc (OS X or Linux) or rc.txt (Windows). A simple example with the most important options:

# Line starting with # is comment and will be ignored
# Local proxy listen address
listen = http://127.0.0.1:7777

# SOCKS5 parent proxy
proxy = socks5://127.0.0.1:1080
# HTTP parent proxy
proxy = http://127.0.0.1:8080
proxy = http://user:password@127.0.0.1:8080
# shadowsocks parent proxy
proxy = ss://aes-128-cfb:password@1.2.3.4:8388
# cow parent proxy
proxy = cow://aes-128-cfb:password@1.2.3.4:8388

See detailed configuration example for other features.

The PAC file can be accessed at http://<listen>/pac, for the above example: http://127.0.0.1:7777/pac.

Command line options can override options in the configuration file For more details, see the output of cow -h

Blocked and directly accessible sites list

In ideal situation, you don't need to specify which sites are blocked and which are not, but COW hasen't reached that goal. So you may need to manually specify this if COW made the wrong judgement.

  • <dir containing rc file>/blocked for blocked sites
  • <dir containing rc file>/direct for directly accessible sites
  • One line for each domain
    • google.com means *.google.com
    • You can use domains like google.com.hk

Technical details

Visited site recording

COW records all visited hosts and visit count in stat (which is a json file) under the same directory with config file.

  • For unknown site, first try direct access, use parent proxy upon failure. After 2 minutes, try direct access again
    • Builtin common blocked site in order to reduce time to discover blockage and the use parent proxy
  • Hosts will be put into PAC after a few times of successful direct visit
  • Hosts will use parent proxy if direct access failed for a few times
    • To avoid mistakes, will try direct access with some probability
  • Host will be deleted if not visited for a few days
  • Hosts under builtin/manually specified blocked and direct domains will not appear in stat

How does COW detect blocked sites

Upon the following error, one domain is considered to be blocked

  • Server connection reset
  • Connection to server timeout
  • Read from server timeout

COW will retry HTTP request upon these errors, But if there's some data sent back to the client, connection with the client will be dropped to signal error..

Server connection reset is usually reliable in detecting blocked sites. But timeout is not. COW tries to estimate timeout value every 30 seconds, in order to avoid considering normal sites as blocked when network condition is bad. Revert to direct access after two minutes upon first blockage is also to avoid mistakes.

If automatica timeout retry causes problem for you, try to change readTimeout and dialTimeout in configuration.

Limitations

  • No caching, COW just passes traffic between clients and web servers
    • For web browsing, browsers have their own cache
  • Blocked site detection is not always reliable

Acknowledgements

Refer to README.md.