why not WPAD?

Salvatore's recent draft on trusted proxies
(http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-loreto-httpbis-trusted-proxy20-00.txt)
presents one approach for browsers to learn about the presence of
proxies, even when the browser is first using HTTPS to talk to the
Internet.

But WPAD already exists for this purpose and all of the browsers
support it in one form or another -- chrome recently added support for
WPAD over DHCP as I understand it. I know there are implementation
problems with WPAD and proxy autoconfig but fundamentally what is
wrong with the approach of leveraging DHCP and DNS to discover proxies
and then relying on a simple javascript-based script to determine when
the proxy should be used?

Is there something fatally flawed about the WPAD/PAC model for dynamic
proxy detection? If this topic is covered in another thread, please
send me a link to it.

Thanks,

Peter

Received on Wednesday, 15 January 2014 19:09:41 UTC