78

I've found some interesting reading on the X-Forwarded-* headers, including the Reverse Proxy Request Headers section in the Apache documentation, as well as the Wikipedia article on X-Forwarded-For.

I understand that:

  • X-Forwarded-For gives the address of the client which connected to the proxy
  • X-Forwarded-Port gives the port the client connected to on the proxy (e.g. 80 or 443)
  • X-Forwarded-Proto gives the protocol the client used to connect to the proxy (http or https)
  • X-Forwarded-Host gives the content of the Host header the client sent to the proxy.

These all make sense.

However, I still can't figure out a real life use case of X-Forwarded-Host. I understand the need to repeat the connection on a different port or using a different scheme, but why would a proxy server ever change the Host header when repeating the request to the target server?

BenMorel
  • 34,448
  • 50
  • 182
  • 322

7 Answers7

33

If you use a front-end service like Apigee as the front-end to your APIs, you will need something like X-FORWARDED-HOST to understand what hostname was used to connect to the API, because Apigee gets configured with whatever your backend DNS is, nginx and your app stack only see the Host header as your backend DNS name, not the hostname that was called in the first place.

Astra
  • 10,735
  • 3
  • 37
  • 41
  • 3
    I don't understand why e.g. Apigee doesn't forward the `Host` header from the client unmolested through to the origin server (as the [RFC says it should](https://www.w3.org/Protocols/rfc2616/rfc2616-sec14.html#sec14.23)). – Christopher Schultz Mar 07 '17 at 16:03
  • 1
    The purpose of the "host" header is to identify which domain the proxy sends the request, in case the final application exposes several domains behind a single ip, it is this header that will identify the correct service – Antoine Apr 17 '18 at 07:37
  • maybe not the `HOST`- but `X-FORWARDED-HOST` for sre – Antoniossss May 21 '20 at 12:22
30

This is the scenario I worked on today: Users access certain application server using "https://neaturl.company.com" URL which is pointing to Reverse Proxy. Proxy then terminates SSL and redirects users' requests to the actual application server which has URL of "http://192.168.1.1:5555". The problem is - when application server needed to redirect user to other page on the same server using absolute path, it was using latter URL and users don't have access to this. Using X-Forwarded-Host (+ X-Forwarded-Proto and X-Forwarded-Port) allowed our proxy to tell application server which URL user used originally and thus server started to generate correct absolute path in its responses.

In this case there was no option to stop application server to generate absolute URLs nor configure it for "public url" manually.

Xantrul
  • 431
  • 5
  • 5
13

I can tell you a real life issue, I had an issue using an IBM portal.

In my case the problem was that the IBM portal has a rest service which retrieves an url for a resource, something like: {"url":"http://internal.host.name/path"}

What happened? Simple, when you enter from intranet everything works fine because internalHostName exists but... when the user enter from internet then the proxy is not able to resolve the host name and the portal crashes.

The fix for the IBM portal was to read the X-FORWARDED-HOST header and then change the response to something like: {"url":"http://internet.host.name/path"}

See that I put internet and not internal in the second response.

Carlos Verdes
  • 3,037
  • 22
  • 20
6

For the need for 'x-forwarded-host', I can think of a virtual hosting scenario where there are several internal hosts (internal network) and a reverse proxy sitting in between those hosts and the internet. If the requested host is part of the internal network, the requested host resolves to the reverse proxy IP and the web browser sends the request to the reverse proxy. This reverse proxy finds the appropriate internal host and forwards the request sent by the client to this host. In doing so, the reverse proxy changes the host field to match the internal host and sets the x-forward-host to the actual host requested by the client. More details on reverse proxy can be found in this wikipedia page http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reverse_proxy.

Check this post for details on x-forwarded-for header and a simple demo python script that shows how a web-server can detect the use of a proxy server: x-forwarded-for explained

guest
  • 71
  • 1
  • 2
3

One example could be a proxy that blocks certain hosts and redirects them to an external block page. In fact, I’m almost certain my school filter does this…

(And the reason they might not just pass on the original Host as Host is because some servers [Nginx?] reject any traffic to the wrong Host.)

Ry-
  • 218,210
  • 55
  • 464
  • 476
  • But in that case, it does not *repeat* the connection, it just intercepts it and returns a redirect response? – BenMorel Sep 29 '13 at 23:12
  • @Benjamin: No, it intercepts the connection and proxies a different page. The one I’m talking about, anyways. It may not be optimal, but it’s possible. – Ry- Sep 29 '13 at 23:13
  • Oh, and you mean that the target server (your school server say) uses the `X-Forwarded-Host` to display "You can't connect to *xxx.com*? – BenMorel Sep 29 '13 at 23:14
  • @Benjamin: Yes. Niche, but there’s a lot of that in HTTP… – Ry- Sep 29 '13 at 23:15
3

X-Forwarded-Host just saved my life. CDNs (or reverse proxy if you'd like to go down to "trees") determine which origin to use by Host header a user comes to them with. Thus, a CDN can't use the same Host header to contact the origin - otherwise, the CDN would go to itself in a loop rather than going to the origin. Thus, the CDN uses either IP address or some dummy FQDN as the Host header fetching content from the origin. Now, the origin may wish to know what was the Host header (aka website name) the content is asked for. In my case, one origin served 2 websites.

wick
  • 1,995
  • 2
  • 20
  • 31
0

Another scenario, you license your app to a host URL then you want to load balance across n > 1 servers.

ColWhi
  • 1,077
  • 6
  • 16