Connect to an https service using an http-only client

Question

Is there a simple command line client that would be invoked something like this:

http2https --listen localhost:80 --connect example.com:443

which would then allow me to effectively connect to https://example.com by actually connecting to http://localhost? It would need to work on Windows.

I have tried stunnel, but it doesn't seem to work.

Update:

Here's the output of stunnel.exe -c -r google.com:443 -d 127.0.0.1:8888

No limit detected for the number of clients
stunnel 4.56 on x86-pc-msvc-1500 platform
Compiled/running with OpenSSL 1.0.1e-fips 11 Feb 2013
Threading:WIN32 Sockets:SELECT,IPv6 SSL:ENGINE,OCSP,FIPS
Reading configuration from file -c
Cannot read configuration

Syntax:
stunnel [ [-install | -uninstall] [-quiet] [<filename>] ] | -help | -version | -sockets
    <filename>  - use specified config file
    -install    - install NT service
    -uninstall  - uninstall NT service
    -quiet      - don't display a message box on success
    -help       - get config file help
    -version    - display version and defaults
    -sockets    - display default socket options

Server is down

Solution 1

Paul had it almost right but under Windows you need to add client = yes to the config file since -c is not a command line parameter for windows stunnel.

The following config works for me

[remote]
client = yes
accept = 8888
connect = google.com:443

I ended up using tstunnel.exe rather than stunnel.exe since that is the command line version of stunnel in Windows. Here's the command:

tstunnel remote_stunnel.conf

Solution 2

stunnel is what you are after:

sudo stunnel -c -r google.com:443 -d 127.0.0.1:8888

This sets up a SSL session to the remote party (Google in this case), and creates a listener on localhost port 8888. You can use 80 if you don't already have a listener.

Then you access localhost:8888 and you'll get the remote site.

If you are using Windows, then command line options aren't supported, so create a file stunnel.conf with the parameters within:

[remote]
accept = 8888
connect = google.com:443

Then call it with

stunnel -c stunnel.conf

Solution 3

Here's a node.js script that does what I want:

var http = require('http');
var https = require('https');

http.createServer(function (req, resp) {
    var h = req.headers;
    h.host = "www.example.com";
    var req2 = https.request({ host: h.host, port: 443, path: req.url, method: req.method, headers: h }, function (resp2) {
        resp.writeHead(resp2.statusCode, resp2.headers);
        resp2.on('data', function (d) { resp.write(d); });
        resp2.on('end', function () { resp.end(); });
    });
    req.on('data', function (d) { req2.write(d); });
    req.on('end', function () { req2.end(); });
}).listen(9999, "127.0.0.1");
console.log('Server running at http://127.0.0.1:9999/');

The host and local port are both hardcoded, but it would be easy enough to make them command line parameters.

Comments

[Steve]

Thanks, but it didn't work. The output has been added to the question.

[Steve]

Yes, Windows. See the post. When I'm back on my Windows machine, I'll publish a small nodejs app I wrote for this purpose.

[Steve]

What is there to try? You just added the windows tag. Thanks for that anyway.

[Paul]

Sorry - I meant the updated answer.

[Paul]

@SteveTaylor Did you try without the -c?

[Steve]

Yes, I remember doing it with just a simple config. It died as soon as I hit it with a request. About to post the nodejs solution...

[sibaz]

At my time of reading this, I'm using stunnel 4.53 running on linux and it shows a -c option as 'client mode (remote service uses SSL)' which seems to be what was suggested