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AbdullahAlshehri's avatar
AbdullahAlshehri
Icon for Altostratus rankAltostratus
Apr 26, 2022

Insert XFF on F5 BIG-IP DNS

Hello Everyone, We have F5  DNS configured with SNAT then forward the traffic to F5 WAF (Different device). How we can Insert the XFF header on the F5 DNS.
  • PSFletchTheTek's avatar
    PSFletchTheTek
    Apr 26, 2022

    Ok cool,
    So i think there is your answer, XFF is a HTTP Header, the f5 needs to have the SSL profiles on the front f5 to be able to decrypt add the XFF HTTP Header and then re-encypt it to pass it out back to your waf.

    If you do move the SSL offload to the front f5 you could techincally not reencypt the traffic and just pass it back to the WAF unencrypted but that'll depend on your applicaiton.

  • Simon_Blakely's avatar
    Apr 27, 2022

    OK, so your problem is that you cannot insert an XFF header into TLS encrypted traffic. 
    The easy solution is to terminate TLS on the DNS virtual server, insert the XFF header using an HTTP profile, re-encrypt on the server-side and then send to the WAF. This is the recommended approach.

    There is a harder approach, which is a technique used by Akamai for encrypted traffic that is redirected to an origin server. They insert the original client IP into a TCP option (option 28) because it is rarely used. The option gets extracted at the destination server and inserted into the request as an XFF header using an irule.
    I have an irule to extract an IP address inserted into a TCP Option 28 header - I just need to write an additional irule that could insert it on the server-side of the DNS. I can provide the irules tomorrow. However, the first option above is the preferred option.