Re: [Unbearable] Dealing with header injection through reverse proxies

[Brian Campbell <[e-mail]>]

I perhaps didn't articulate it well in the meeting yesterday but I'd like
to reiterate that, in my opinion and I don't think I'm alone, it would be
very inappropriate for -tokbind-ttrp to define a one-off mechanism for the
origin server to detect client injection of the headers. The potential
problem of client header injection is not at all unique to the
functionality of that draft so the draft shouldn't define a unique
solution. It would be useful if there were a common standardized mechanism
for doing detecting/preventing client header injection that the
-tokbind-ttrp draft could refer to (the generic solution that Ekr mentions
in his [1] seems preferable precisely because it is generally applicable).
In the absence of a generic solution existing currently,
stripping/sanitizing the headers is the de facto means of dealing with the
situation in practice today, is sufficient when properly implemented, and
is normatively required by the text in -tokbind-ttrp. It's true that, if
the reverse proxy is defective/misconfigured, it doesn't fail safe but in
the context of -tokbind-ttrp that failure mode is far from catastrophic.
Such a failure loses the protections afforded by token binding, which is
not ideal, but it is the current state of just about everything on the web
today so it's not *that* bad.






On Mon, Jul 17, 2017 at 5:18 PM, Eric Rescorla <[e-mail]> wrote:

> i folks,
>
> We had a discussion today in TOKBIND about handling security-sensitive
> indications in HTTP headers (this came up in the context of
> https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-campbell-tokbind-ttrp-01)  The
> setting here is that you have a network with a TLS reverse proxy
> serving the origin server, and the TLS proxy is responsible for doing
> some security check and telling the server about it. E.g.,
>
>     Client                    Proxy                     Server
>
>     <--- TLS w/ client auth ---> <----- HTTP with cert --->
>
> The client does TLS client authentication with the proxy and then
> passes the certificate to the back-end server in an injected HTTP
> header (e.g., X-Client-Certificate). In order for this to be secure,
> the proxy has to *strip* any security sensitive headers sent by the
> client. Otherwise, the client could inject their own headers that
> would appear to come from the proxy.
>
> Obviously, this design doesn't fail safe if the proxy fails to
> strip the headers. One way in which this can happen is if you
> have a large network of load balancers fronting a server network
> and you somehow incompletely misconfigure either the servers
> or the proxies, so that a server which supports this mechanism
> ends up behind a proxy which does not (and hence does not strip
> the headers). So, it would be nice to do something better that
> wasn't too heavyweight, especailly as a general solution.
>
> One natural design is simply to have a shared key between the
> proxy and the server. In that case, it's easy to demonstrate
> that the header is injected, as in [0][1]
>
>    X-Client-Certificate: <key>, <certificate>
>
> The obvious objection to this design is that it requires you to
> establish the shared key, and people were concerned about having to
> configure it into the proxy. I'm aware of a number of designs here:
>
> - Configure it via some sort of remote configuration mechanism.
> - The proxy could send it to the server on its first request
>   (might require some trickery on the server).
> - If you have a TLS channel between Proxy and Server you can
>   use a TLS exporter.
> - If you have a H2 connection between the two, you can have the
>   server provide it in a settings frame.
> - Use a signature by the proxy using its private key over something
>   e.g., S(K, "Token binding"). If you use a mostly fixed string,
>   then the server just needs to verify it once.
>
> Do people have other thoughts on this problem? Other good ways to
> establish the key? Other ideas for how to address it?
>
> -Ekr
>
>
> [0] I'd originally suggested HMACing, but that's actually not
> necessary, though obviously stronger.
>
> [1] Note that you could have a generic solution, like a header which
> listed all the injected headers, but with the same security mechanism.
>
>
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