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Rate Limiting with Nginx

Do you manage a website? Does it have a login form? Can somebody brute force attack it with every common username/password combination until they find one that works?

For many small web applications, the answer to all of the above is, “yes”. This is a security risk and the solution is rate limiting. Rate limiting allows you to slow down the rate of requests and even deny requests beyond a specific threshold. Unfortunately, for most busy web developers, rate limiting is often tossed into a large pile of “things I know I should do, but don’t have time for”.

Advanced rate limiting apps such as django-ratelimit exist, but if you use Nginx as a reverse proxy to your application, the solution is almost trivial.

Let’s start with a typical Nginx reverse proxy config:

upstream myapp {
    server 127.0.0.1:8081;
}

server {
    ...
    location / {
        proxy_pass http://myapp;
        proxy_set_header X-Real-IP $remote_addr;
        proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for;
        proxy_set_header Host $http_host;
    }
}

To enable rate limiting simply add the following line to the top-level of your config file:

limit_req_zone $binary_remote_addr zone=login:10m rate=1r/s;

This creates a shared memory zone called “login” to store a log of IP addresses that access the rate limited URL(s). 10 MB (10m) will give us enough space to store a history of 160k requests. It will only allow 1 request per second (1r/s).

Then apply it to a location by adding a stanza to your server block:

location /account/login/ {
    # apply rate limiting
    limit_req zone=login burst=5;

    # boilerplate copied from location /
    proxy_pass http://myapp;
    proxy_set_header X-Real-IP $remote_addr;
    proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for;
    proxy_set_header Host $http_host;
}

Here we’re rate limiting the /account/login/ URL. The burst argument tells Nginx to start dropping requests if more than 5 queue up from a specific IP. As you may have noticed, there’s some duplicated configuration between location / and this stanza. Unfortunately this is a necessary evil, but a good configuration management tool can help you avoid error-prone copy/pasting.

Reload Nginx with your new config and you’re good to go. To verify it’s working, this nasty little bash one-liner can throw out a bunch of HTTP requests quickly:

for i in {0..20}; do (curl -Is https://example.com/accounts/login/ | head -n1 &) 2>/dev/null; done

You should only see 200 responses once per second and probably some 503 responses when the queued requests exceeded the burst value. Comparing the results to a regular URL can help you see the difference rate limiting makes.

Here’s a full Nginx config with rate limiting enabled. Now go secure your sites!

Peter Baumgartner

About the author

Peter Baumgartner

Peter is the founder of Lincoln Loop, having built it up from a small freelance operation in 2007 to what it is today. He is constantly learning and is well-versed in many technical disciplines including devops, …

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