pepper

README

Pepper

Personal web-proxy written in Go.

Pepper was developed to fix two problems:

1. Improve privacy while surfing the web
2. Unify keyword search among all browsers

The first problem is tackled by black- and whitelising domains known to track users and blocking web-bugs like single pixel GIFs. The second problem is more of a convenience and allows you to setup keyword search once and use them on all browsers.

This project is a work-in-process.

Features:

• Block web-bugs
• Blacklist domains known to track users and server ads
• Unify Keyword search engine among all browsers

Build

To build Pepper you must have Go installed.

export GOPATH=$(pwd)/go
mkdir -p $GOPATH
git clone http://github.com/namsral/pepper
cd ./pepper
go build pepper.go sem.go

Install

OSX

On OSX you can have pepper run as a service by creating a launchagent.

The following setup assumes you installed the pepper binary at /usr/local/bin/pepper and the data file at /Users/namsral/pepper.json.

1. Create a new agent:

cat > ~/Library/LaunchAgents/com.namsral.pepper.plist
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
<plist version="1.0">
<dict>
   <key>Label</key>
   <string>com.namsral.pepper</string>
   <key>ProgramArguments</key>
   <array>
      <string>-data=/usr/local/bin/pepper</string>
      <string>-data=/Users/namsral/pepper.json</string>
      <string>-http=127.0.0.1:8081</string>
   </array>
   <key>Sockets</key>
   <dict>
      <key>Listeners</key>
      <dict>
         <key>SockServiceName</key>
         <string>8081</string>
      </dict>
   </dict>
   <key>KeepAlive</key>
   <true/>
   </dict>
</plist>

1. Enable the new agent and have Pepper started automatically:

sudo launchctl load -F ~/Library/LaunchAgents/com.namsral.pepper.plist

*Nix

On other *nixes run pepper in the background:

The following setup assumes you installed the pepper binary at /usr/local/bin/pepper and the data file at /home/namsral/pepper.json.

./pepper -http=127.0.0.1:8081 -data=~/pepper.json

Or you could write a startup file for your favourite init system.

Browser setup

1. Launch your browser and configure the HTTP proxy to point to host:127.0.0.1 and port:8081
2. Surf to http://pepper to check the new proxy is working
3. If your browser support it add a custom search engine with url: http://pepper/search?q=%s, or set your search engine to Bing as Pepper wil Hijack any search request made to http://www.bing.com/search.
4. One last thing to do is edit pepper.json and add your own domain blacklist and search engine keywords.

Todo

As mentioned above, this is a work-in-process project so there are things todo:

• Persist blacklisted web-bug URLs
• Move to a datastore
• More efficient response handling, preferebly within the proxyHandler
• Expand webBugHandler to block other tracking methods beside single pixel GIFs
• Modify resources from the browser; search engines, blacklists, etc
• Multiuser support; home or small office use

License

Pepper is licensed under the terms of the MIT license, see attached LICENSE file for more details.