Standalone HTTP-HTTPS gateway?

[Albert LaFrance]

I'm using a Do-More BRX to push data to a shared server via HTTP Post, and receive commands from the server in the response. It's not a critical application, but I'd like to upgrade to HTTPS. Unfortunately TLS handshaking on the BRX is slow; the total transaction time (request sent to response received) is in the 8-14 second range with HTTPS, versus about 1 second with HTTP.

So I'm wondering, does anyone make a "black box" gateway/adapter/router/whatever that would sit between the PLC and the network, transparently converting outgoing HTTP requests to HTTPS, and the reverse for responses?

 

[drbitboy]

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/8017508/solutions-to-convert-http-traffic-to-https-proxy-relay


The idea would be to set up a RaspberryPI or similar running linkx and Apache server, and this is all it does.

 

[drbitboy]

And here is a Python script that should do the proxy i.e. relay the HTTP request from the BRX HTTP client to an HTTPS server, and then relay the HTTPS response from the HTTPS server to the BRX HTTP client.

 

[Albert LaFrance]

Thank you very much for that suggestion! I don't know Python but I was able to implement it easily in a few lines of PHP. It's working perfectly - I'm getting round-trip response times consistently well under one second.

 

[drbitboy]

Sweet!


Can you post the code? It might help someone in the future.


Also, what environment (hardware, OS) are you running it on?

 

[Albert LaFrance]

Sweet!


Can you post the code? It might help someone in the future.


Also, what environment (hardware, OS) are you running it on?

Sure, I'm attaching the code (remove the .txt extension). It needs some improvements like error handling, but it at least shows what's possible.

It's running on a Raspberry Pi 4 (2 GB) with the standard Raspberry Pi operating system, Apache server, and PHP. The only changes I made to the default installation were:

(1) assigning a static IP address in /etc/dhcpd.conf

(2) disabling wi-fi and Bluetooth by adding the following lines to the [all] section of /boot/config.txt:

dtoverlay=disable-wifi
dtoverlay=disable-bt