Definition
Plain language
A middleman server that passes traffic between you and the site you're actually contacting.
As stated in the literature
A network intermediary that forwards, filters, or caches requests; a common target class in security testing because it parses untrusted protocol data at a trust boundary.
Also called: proxies, proxy server
Why it matters: Because a proxy handles raw traffic from untrusted sources at the edge of a network, a bug in one can expose everything sitting behind it.
For example, a company might route all employee web traffic through a proxy that blocks known-bad sites before requests ever leave the building.
Heard on the show
“And the headline empirical result is that this proxy correlates positively with final task performance — Spearman around plus zero-point-three-nine.”Episode 010 — When Reward Climbs But Reasoning Goes Generic: Diagnosing Template Collapse in Agentic RL