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Reverse proxy deep dive: Why HTTP parsing at the edge is harder than it looks
In Part 1 of this series, we explored a high-level overview of reverse proxies and dived deep into connection management. This post shifts our focus to the intricate world of HTTP handling within a reverse proxy.
While many standard libraries support these steps, making them work reliably at scale, and meeting strict security and compliance requirements, is surprisingly complex. However, this opens up a potential vulnerability: a maliciously crafted User-Agent string can cause regex engines to backtrack excessively, leading to denial-of-service (DoS) conditions such as stack overflows or system crashes. In future posts, we’ll explore how proxies tackle service discovery, load balancing, HTTP client behavior, and observability, and how these low-level responsibilities can ripple through the architecture of an entire distributed system
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