Reverse Proxy Make A Comeback

It seems the latest news in the proxy world is all about Web Application Firewalls (WAF). It just goes to show you that everything old is new again. WAFs are of course nothing more than souped up reverse proxies, which were the rage when the dot com boom came about. Reverse proxies were used to prevent overload on webservers and distributed the web load to proxy servers that not only cached content, but also protected the web servers to some degree.

In today's world the WAF, is a bit more sophisticated in that there's more malware and more cybercrime in the world. The good news is that most reverse proxy vendors out there have improved their offering to include protection against schemes like SQL injection and Cross site scripting (XSS), regardless of whether they use the fancy new WAF terminology to label themselves as such. Also today's WAF or reverse proxy supports SSL proxy, important because more and more webservers today rely on SSL as a base protocol, rather than the exception.

So if you're trying to protect your webservers, remember to check out WAFs as well as reverse proxies, since reverse proxies probably do more than you remember them doing in the past.