Cake is a compact, powerful toolkit that combines a flexible TCP/UDP proxy, port forwarding system, and connection manager designed for both development and penetration testing scenarios. It enables users to create complex networking flows where traffic can be proxied, relayed, and manipulated between endpoints — useful for debugging networked applications, inspecting protocols, or tunneling traffic through different hops. The tool is designed to work with multiple protocols and supports dynamic rule definitions so that incoming and outgoing connections can be routed, rewritten, or logged according to user-defined policies. Unlike many simple proxies, Cake can act as a full connection broker: it can bind to arbitrary interfaces, handle simultaneous upstream/downstream sessions, and apply traffic rules on the fly. This makes it suitable for troubleshooting tricky network behavior, simulating network conditions, or chaining services in a modular test environment.
Features
- Combined TCP/UDP proxy with flexible connection management
- Dynamic rule definitions for routing and traffic manipulation
- Support for port forwarding and multi-hop traffic flows
- Bidirectional session handling with on-the-fly connection policy application
- Lightweight, low-dependency design suitable for dev and security use cases
- CLI-friendly interface for quick debugging and network experimentation