Description
Proxy chain with BlueCoat ICAP client and specific BlueCoat SGOS modifies URLs incorrectly.
Symptoms
When special characters are used as a part of search item and/or serve as part of url-cgi parameters, the resulting URLs may be wrong or malformed.
Cause
This behavior occurs due to SGOS recursively percent-encoding the percent sign (%) in percent-encoded characters that are embedded in the URL. In other words, the percent sign in percent-encoded characters is replaced with "%25". For example, "%2B" (percent-encoded plus sign), will become "%252B"
Lets review search query for "Finjan+Business" with the Google through this proxy chain:
The search results for this query are as following:
To find the modifications for URL parameters in this example review the network traffic:
Packet #1128
A client (10.194.150.155) issues a request to the BlueCoat (10.194.150.80) :
HTTP GET http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=Finjan%2BBusiness&btnG=Google+Search
Packet #1130
Blue Coat (10.194.150.80) modifies it and forwards a modified request to Finjan (10.194.150.117) :
GET http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=Finjan%252BBusiness&btnG=Google+Search
Packet #1133
Finjan (10.194.150.117) proceeds with the (wrong) request to the WebServer :
HTTP GET /search?hl=en&q=Finjan%2BBusiness&btnG=Google+Search
Solution
This behavior occurs when Blue Coat is running SGOS 4.2.4.x series.
Blue Coat technical support confirmed that this issue is scheduled to be resolved in SGOS 4.2.4.10 release.
In several cases solution for this behavior is to wrap such special characters with the spaces:
This search request is treated as expected :
And these are the results :
Software Version
N/A<
- This article applies to:
- NG 1000
- NG 5000
- NG 6000
- NG 8000
- This article was previously published as:
- Finjan KB 1550