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Posted to users@tomcat.apache.org by Matt Peterson <ma...@une.edu.au> on 2010/06/17 02:41:10 UTC
HTTP connector to be aware of proxied SSL requests
Hi All,
We have a hardware load balancer terminating SSL requests before making a
plain-text connection with Tomcat. So that all contexts are aware that the
request is actually a secure request, we have implemented the RemoteIpValve
with a LB injected header. This works well for our apps. However, we have
noticed that there is some processing of the request happening within the
connector, before the valves are processed. In particular, the redirecting
to URLs with a trailing slash. Because this processing is occurring before
the valves are processed the Connector still thinks that the original
request was a non-secure one, even though it was not. The result is that
requests to https://domain.name/context are redirected to
http://domain.name/context/ instead of to https://domain.name/context/. This
is not major, because our LB then redirects from http://domain.name/context/
to https://domain.name/context/ and all is good (except for the extra
redirect).
I can't find any documentation on the order of events for the Connector, so
I'm not sure what other decisions get made based on the request attributes,
but assume there are others.
Is there another solution to handling proxied SSL requests so that Catalina
as well as our apps are aware that the requests are secure??? One
possibility is to have two Connectors (1 using the secure, scheme and
serverPort attributes for secure and 1 for non-secure) and have the LB
connect to the appropriate Connector depending on the request. But this
effectively doubles the amount of config needed to be managed (2nd set of
config for LB + 2nd connector), which is considerable when dealing with 6 TC
clusters each with their own set of LB config.
Should I lodge an enhancement request for the Connector to become aware of
proxied SSL requests (perhaps via an injected x-forwarded-proto header, ala
WebLogic)?
Cheers,
Matt.
Re: HTTP connector to be aware of proxied SSL requests
Posted by Mark Thomas <ma...@apache.org>.
On 18/06/2010 00:36, Matthew Peterson wrote:
> Out of interest, what are some of the security risks around non-trusted proxies injecting the x-forwarded-* headers?
Mainly an issue if you use the RemoteAddressValve or a similar mechanism
to secure your webapp based on client IP address. If an untrusted proxy
can change the apparent IP address, they can bypass your security.
For https/http I'd be worried about untrusted proxies making Tomcat
think a requert was received over https was actually insecure. That will
change how Tomcat handles session IDs etc and could maybe (I haven't
thought this through) lead to the session ID being exposed over http
when it should only be sent over hhttps.
Mark
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RE: HTTP connector to be aware of proxied SSL requests
Posted by Matthew Peterson <ma...@une.edu.au>.
"This is *open* source..."
Thx Capt. Obvious - very helpful ;-)
....
OK, so I now understand why it was chosen to perform the redirection in the Connector rather than in a Valve; to remove unnecessary processing keeping the redirect response as efficient as possible. I might lodge an enhancement for the connector to have the redirect configurable so that it can be disabled via an element attribute. The redirecting can then be done as a valve instead.
We are using an F5 LB which does not support AJP. So that option will not work for us. The other option of using multiple HTTP Connectors is doable, but adds a lot of config management overhead (and points of possible failure/error) which is not very popular with those responsible for that management. But that is an internal issue which I need to deal with if this prob is deemed to be worth the worry.
Out of interest, what are some of the security risks around non-trusted proxies injecting the x-forwarded-* headers?
Thanks for your help,
Matt.
-----Original Message-----
From: Mark Thomas [mailto:markt@apache.org]
Sent: Thursday, 17 June 2010 10:28 PM
To: Tomcat Users List
Subject: Re: HTTP connector to be aware of proxied SSL requests
On 17/06/2010 01:41, Matt Peterson wrote:
> I can't find any documentation on the order of events for the Connector, so
> I'm not sure what other decisions get made based on the request attributes,
> but assume there are others.
This is *open* source...
> Is there another solution to handling proxied SSL requests so that Catalina
> as well as our apps are aware that the requests are secure??? One
> possibility is to have two Connectors (1 using the secure, scheme and
> serverPort attributes for secure and 1 for non-secure) and have the LB
> connect to the appropriate Connector depending on the request. But this
> effectively doubles the amount of config needed to be managed (2nd set of
> config for LB + 2nd connector), which is considerable when dealing with 6 TC
> clusters each with their own set of LB config.
The other option would be to proxy using AJP rather than HTTP (if the
load-balancer supports it) since AJP passes SSL info as part of the
protocol.
If you want to use mixed HTTP/HTTPS in the LB and just HTTP on Tomcat
than multiple connectors is usually what I'd recommend.
> Should I lodge an enhancement request for the Connector to become aware of
> proxied SSL requests (perhaps via an injected x-forwarded-proto header, ala
> WebLogic)?
You can, not sure how much traction it would get. Both the logic and
configuration is non-trivial to ensure only trusted proxies set the
header. We try to keep the connector code fairly slick. This feels like
more than we would want to add (bearing in mind this is just instinct -
I haven't looked at any code at ths point).
You might have better luck with an option to defer the redirection with
the / to later in the processing chain. That would be simpler to
implement but would add some extra processing that currently is bypassed
by doing the rediection as early as possible.
Mark
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Re: HTTP connector to be aware of proxied SSL requests
Posted by Mark Thomas <ma...@apache.org>.
On 17/06/2010 01:41, Matt Peterson wrote:
> I can't find any documentation on the order of events for the Connector, so
> I'm not sure what other decisions get made based on the request attributes,
> but assume there are others.
This is *open* source...
> Is there another solution to handling proxied SSL requests so that Catalina
> as well as our apps are aware that the requests are secure??? One
> possibility is to have two Connectors (1 using the secure, scheme and
> serverPort attributes for secure and 1 for non-secure) and have the LB
> connect to the appropriate Connector depending on the request. But this
> effectively doubles the amount of config needed to be managed (2nd set of
> config for LB + 2nd connector), which is considerable when dealing with 6 TC
> clusters each with their own set of LB config.
The other option would be to proxy using AJP rather than HTTP (if the
load-balancer supports it) since AJP passes SSL info as part of the
protocol.
If you want to use mixed HTTP/HTTPS in the LB and just HTTP on Tomcat
than multiple connectors is usually what I'd recommend.
> Should I lodge an enhancement request for the Connector to become aware of
> proxied SSL requests (perhaps via an injected x-forwarded-proto header, ala
> WebLogic)?
You can, not sure how much traction it would get. Both the logic and
configuration is non-trivial to ensure only trusted proxies set the
header. We try to keep the connector code fairly slick. This feels like
more than we would want to add (bearing in mind this is just instinct -
I haven't looked at any code at ths point).
You might have better luck with an option to defer the redirection with
the / to later in the processing chain. That would be simpler to
implement but would add some extra processing that currently is bypassed
by doing the rediection as early as possible.
Mark
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