Master Docker

Source code for docker images used in master's thesis to investigate the semantic gap in HTTP protocols.

Frontend

The source code for the frontend docker images are in the ./frontend folder.
The frontends are configured to:

• Enable downstream HTTP/2
• Enable downstream HTTP/3 (if supported)
• Block requests with a path starting with /admin
• Forward requests to a docker container with name backend running in the same docker network on port 8080 using HTTP/1.1

Images	HTTP/2 downstream	HTTP/3 downstream
martinvks/frontend_apache2	✅	❌
martinvks/frontend_apache_traffic_server	✅	❌
martinvks/frontend_caddy	✅	✅
martinvks/frontend_envoy	✅	✅
martinvks/frontend_haproxy	✅	❌
martinvks/frontend_nginx	✅	❌
martinvks/frontend_traefik	✅	✅
martinvks/frontend_varnish	✅	❌

Backend

The source code for the backend docker images are in the ./backend folder.
They are configured to:

• Run on port 8080
• Respond with an index.html on requests to / and /index.html
• Respond with a text message on requests to /admin

Images:

• martinvks/backend_express
• martinvks/backend_gin
• martinvks/backend_spring-boot-tomcat

Compose

The docker-compose.yml file can be used to set up a test environment using a specific frontend and backend image. The following environment variables must be set:

Key	Description	Example value
DOCKER_FRONTEND_IMAGE	Docker image to use as frontend	martinvks/frontend_envoy
DOCKER_BACKEND_IMAGE	Docker image to use as backend	martinvks/backend_spring-boot-tomcat
DOCKER_DEV_CERTIFICATE	File with certificate data in PEM format	./fullchain.pem
DOCKER_DEV_CERTIFICATE_KEY	File with certificate private key in PEM format	./privkey.pem

Example:

$ cat .env
DOCKER_FRONTEND_IMAGE=martinvks/frontend_envoy
DOCKER_BACKEND_IMAGE=martinvks/backend_spring-boot-tomcat
DOCKER_DEV_CERTIFICATE=./fullchain.pem
DOCKER_DEV_CERTIFICATE_KEY=./privkey.pem
$ docker compose up
...

Varnish

The open-source version of Varnish does not provide TLS termination.
For Varnish frontend use the docker-compose-varnish.yml file instead, which uses Hitch as TLS proxy.

Packet capture

Packet capturing is enabled on the backend and the pcap file is written to ./capture/backend.pcap