Hi all,

Is anyone else running Varnish behind AWS ALBs? I just encountered an issue 
today with how I have been using X-Forwarded-For to check against a Varnish ACL 
in that is more restrictive than the ALB's security group, but I realized the 
hard way that since X-Forwarded-For can be arbitrarily set, a malicious actor 
can set it to an address that is permitted by the Varnish ACL, whether through 
guessing or other knowledge. Since Varnish gets XFF from the ALB, which in turn 
trusts existing XFF headers, you can't then really trust client.ip since it's 
just taken from XFF. Unless I'm missing something...

I've opened a support case with AWS to see if there's a way to configure an ALB 
to not trust XFF and use the IP from the original TCP connection, but I'm not 
hopeful. I'll likely have to go back to using two ALBs rather than one 
relatively open one and one with a Varnish ACL for tigher controls to a certain 
subset of the web sites behind the single ALB.

Justin

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