Question about reverse proxies and WAFs

[CJ Ess]

There is a version of modsecurity for Nginx -
https://github.com/SpiderLabs/ModSecurity - however it tends to cause
random mysterious problems including segfaults so maybe not what your
looking for.

There are also several WAFs built upon Openresty (nginx + luajit at
openresty.com) however I haven't set any of them up yet so I can't comment
on their production readiness.

If you do have a WAF running I'd let to handle both SSL and non-SSL
connections. SSL isn't the barrier it used to be, in fact there is a push
to stomp out plain http altogether, and the last few months I'm definitely
seeings bots, crawlers, and scripts adapting and connecting via SSL.


On Sun, Apr 24, 2016 at 11:28 PM, Francisco V. <iseeprimenumbers at gmail.com>
wrote:

> Hi all,
>
>          How are you?
>
> First of all excuse my english as it is not my mother tongue.
>
> I'd like to ask a rather general question which is not nginx specific:
> In my new job they use an Apache webserver running mod_proxy as a
> reverse proxy that works as the single entry point from the outside
> for all the apps that work in the LAN. That is, the webserver is in
> DMZ when they need an app published outside, the networking guys give
> permission on the firewall from the internal server to the DMZ reverse
> proxy which in turn is NAT'ed to the internet.
>
> That reverse proxy does two things:
>
> First it encrypts traffic, or it seems so, that is: The vhost
> listening on port 443 is the one that does all the proxy pass to the
> backend servers, so if anyone points their browser to
> https://outside-address/app they'd go directly to the appserver. But
> if they to http://outside-address/app, using mod_rewrite, they're
> redirected to https://outside-address/app.
>
> And second, it runs mod_security with the OWASP rules to act as a Web
> Application Firewall.
>
> My question is this a good setup for a reverse proxy + WAF?
>
> As far as I'm concerned if you hit directly port 443 and get
> redirected to the app, no modsecurity inspection is made, because the
> request is SSL encrypted, right? The only modsecurity inspection would
> be when you hit port 80 and get your address rewritten to https, is it
> true?
>
> Also, I don't know if nginx does the same, but for requests to be
> proxied by Apache it seems that they must share the URL pattern with
> the app server, that is:
>
> It seems that you CAN NOT proxy http://outside-address/my_app to
> http://server_in_the_lan_hosting_my_app/ BUT you must do:
>
> http://outside-address/my_app/ proxied to http://lanserver/my_app/ if
> the URL part "my_app" isn't matched it won't redirect requests to the
> backend. Is this correct?
>
> And last, I'm writing this here because I tried to migrate this to
> nginx once, but it kept crashing (Not even finishing to start up) with
> the OWASP core rules.
>
> Does it makes sense SSL rewrites/termination on a reverse proxy/WAF?
>
> Can nginx handle proxing requests that won't match URL patterns? Like
> I mentioned above?
>
> Does anybody run nginx + OWASP rules for mod security?
>
> Thanks in advance and sorry for the bothering,
>
> Francisco
> Buenos Aires
> Argentina
>
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