Yavli Resilience – Working Principles

1 December 2015 by Alexander Bukev

Yavli Resilience uses an approach called Reverse Proxy.

This allows our content to be served on behalf of your website. This makes us different from other ad providers since our content does not come from third-party domains, but comes directly through your site.

 

An example third-party resource would look like this:

http://some-ad-company.com/some-ad-image.jpg

 

Instead, our content comes directly through your site using the Reverse Proxy:

http://www.your-website.com/yavli-ad-image.jpg

 

Also, our service strives to make our URL’s look as close as possible to your native images’ URL’s. For example, an image on your website might look like this:

http://www.your-website.com/content/gallery/article-image-12345.jpg

 

So our images will be requested as something like:

http://www.your-website.com/content/gallery/some-random-image-name-913.jpg

 

All this is needed to prevent adblocking solutions from deploying any kind of filters over our content:
– We are not vulnerable to third-party blocks, because we get our resources directly from the main domain of your site.
– We are not vulnerable to any URL pattern blocks, because our URL’s look very close to your native images and a filter cannot differentiate it.
– Even if they block the specific image name – some-random-image-name-913.jpg in the example above, we regularly change these names so those filters also fail to block us.

 

Let’s explore the Reverse Proxy configuration:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{DOCUMENT_ROOT}%{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteRule "(.*\.(|jpg|jpeg|gif|png))$" "http://steg.yavli.com/$1" [NC,P]

 

RewriteCond %{DOCUMENT_ROOT}%{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
This requires that the URL does not lead to a file on the server in order for our rule to be executed. It guarantees that requests for your own images will never be sent to our server.

 

RewriteRule “(.*\.(|jpg|jpeg|gif|png))$” “http://steg.yavli.com/$1” [NC,P]
This is the actual rewrite rule which forwards all requests that match the condition above to the Yavli server using a proxy request.