proxy
termnetworkingsecurity
An intermediary that terminates one connection and makes another on the requester's behalf, rather than forwarding packets.
Terminating is the difference from routing, and everything follows from it: the proxy is a party to the conversation, so it can read, rewrite, cache, authenticate and log - and it becomes a place where plaintext exists, a bottleneck under load, and a single component whose failure is total. Forward proxies act for clients going out, reverse proxies act for servers being reached; the mechanics are the same and only the direction of trust differs.
Also known as: forward proxy, reverse proxy