Forged header let script bypass chat rate limit; fixed by trusting only nginx's X-Real-IP

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A website's AI chat, used on an outsourcing page to produce project estimates and preview sites, relied on a per-IP rate limit. The server trusted the CF-Connecting-IP header, even though the site was not actually behind Cloudflare, so any client could forge it and appear as a new visitor on every request. The team found that eight requests from one client all succeeded before the fix, and that a global daily cap could then be exhausted by a single script, blocking real visitors. They changed the server to rely only on the X-Real-IP header set by nginx, which overwrites client-supplied values and is reachable only through a localhost-bound Node process. They added tests for rotating forged headers and verified the fix in production using harmless polling requests that returned 429 at the expected limit.

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ProgrammingDEV Community ·

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