Try uProxy

This document describes an exercise to install and run uProxy on Chrome, and manually verify that it is working.

Set up Chrome profiles

Create two Chrome profiles for testing named “uProxy Alice” and “uProxy Bob”:

See details on how to add users here: https://support.google.com/chrome/answer/2364824?hl=en

Install uProxy

1. Switch to the Alice, go to http://uproxy.org and press the “Install uProxy” button. In Chrome, the installation has two steps: the application and the extension.
2. Repeat the process with Bob.

Share the connection

Alice will be sharing her internet access, and Bob will be consuming it.

With Alice:

1. Start uProxy and click on the + button.
2. Under “Choose a social network”, choose “uProxy”.
3. Select the “Offer access” box and press “Generate link”. Copy that link.

With Bob:

1. Open Alice’s link in a new window. That will launch the uProxy app.
2. uProxy will ask you if you would like to add Alice to your contacts. Choose “yes”. Alice will show up in the application home, under the “Get Access” tab.
3. Press “Accept Offer” under the Alice entry, and then press “Start Getting Access”. After a few seconds, if everything went well, Bob will see the message “Getting access from Alice” at the footer. Alice will see a message “Sharing access with Bob”. The uProxy extension icon also changes to indicate that the connection is established.

Disconnect and reconnect

Try a few flows to interrupt and resume the connection

With Bob:

1. On the “Get Access” tab, under Alice’s entry, press “Stop Getting Access”. The message at the footer will disappear. Alice will get a notification of the disconnection.
2. Press “Start Getting Access” to restore the connection. After a few seconds, you will see the connection messages.

With Alice:

1. On the “Share Access” tab, under Bob’s entry, press “Revoke Access”. Bob will receive a disconnection message.
2. Press “Grant” to restore the access. After a few seconds, Bob’s connection will resume. You may need to press “Try Again” on Bob’s disconnection message.

Back to Alice, you will see Bob’s access under the “Share Access” tab, saying he is online and a button to revoke it. If you stop the connection with Bob, Alice will get a notification.

Verify the Connection Outside uProxy

uProxy tells you when the connection is established or not, but you can also verify it outside uProxy.

Inspecting proxy Chrome Internals

1. The url chrome://net-internals/#proxy shows whether you are using a proxy, and its address. With the uProxy connection established, go to that page with both Alice and Bob. You should see different settings. Bob should display socks5://127.0.0.1:<some_port> as its proxy server, indicating communication through Socket Secure protocol with Alice. Alice should display her default proxy settings.
2. Disconnect uProxy. Alice’s page should remain unchanged, and Bob’s page should show the same as Alice’s (unless you’ve changed their original Chrome settings)

Inspecting HTTP/2 Chrome Internals

1. With Bob connected to Alice, go to chrome://net-internals/#http2
2. When you open pages with Bob you’ll see new entries in the table, with a column indicating the proxy they are using. You should see a localhost 127.0.0.1 address there.
3. If you disable the uProxy connection, you will get direct:// as the proxy.

Inspecting public IP address

If you are able to run Alice in a different network than Bob (a different machine is not enough), then you can also check the uProxy connection by looking up Bob’s public IP address on Google: https://www.google.com/#q=my+ip. When connected, Bob’s public IP will be the same as Alice’s.