How safe are cgi/web based proxies?

[LuDaCriS66]

I was just wondering how safe these cgi-proxies are exactly. From my understanding, they simply allow you to surf sites through their own page, thereby serving a bit of anonymity.

It sparked my interest because of a firefox extension I ran into on addons.mozilla.org called Fireprox. Its basically a toolbar for easy access to their cgi proxy.

Wouldn't it be possible for them to record your activity and logins? Not that I would use this for anything serious but more wondering how these proxies work.

 

[n0cmonkey]

You're not anonymous to the proxy. 😉

Anything not encrypted can be picked up. Encrypted stuff can be picked up if you fall for a man in the middle type attack.

 

[zerocool1]

I was wondering about that. If I go to a site that uses an SSL certificate for authentication, since the data isn't being sent in plain-text they proxy can't tell what I'm doing besides the fact that I'm connecting to host x?

 

[n0cmonkey]

Originally posted by: zerocool1
I was wondering about that. If I go to a site that uses an SSL certificate for authentication, since the data isn't being sent in plain-text they proxy can't tell what I'm doing besides the fact that I'm connecting to host x?

If you get the certificate for the site you're trying to get to, then it should be safe. If you don't check you could be getting a cert from the proxy...