How to disable IP Spoofing check in Rails 4 application?

Question

I\'m getting the following error on my Rails 4 application:

ActionDispatch::RemoteIp::IpSpoofAttackError: IP spoofing attack?! HTTP_CLIENT_IP="xx.xx.xx.

Answer 1

Rather than turning off the warning, it might be better to fix the actual problem. Here's my rephrasing of what Rails is telling you:

This request seems to have come through two different reverse proxies. One of them set the CLIENT_IP header to the user's IP address; the other set the X_FORWARDED_FOR header. One of those values is probably correct, the other probably contains the IP of a reverse proxy, and I have no way to tell which is which. I can't reliably determine this user's IP address, so I'm going to reject the request.

The "correct" solution is to stop setting both headers. For that you'll need to track down where they're coming from (I'd start with your Bluecoat device) and find out if they're both needed. Usually you'll only use one or the other.

If it turns out they are both needed (I've seen stranger things), then you'll need to find out which header is being set first (assuming there are two proxies in the chain). Then you can write a custom middleware that deletes the other HTTP header.

See Rails 3 middleware modify request headers for pointers on how to create your own middleware. Insert it before the RemoteIp middleware, clear out whichever header has the "bad" value, and you should be good.

Answer 2

config.action_dispatch.ip_spoofing_check = false is still the correct setting.

However, web-console (included in Rails development environment by default since Rails 4.2) doesn't respect this setting and raises IpSpoofAttackError whenever it's included in the application stack, even when spoofing_check is false. A workaround for this issue is to remove web-console from your environment's application stack.

See rails/rails#32379 and rails/web-console#254 for more details on this issue and a proposed fix.

Answer 3

config.action_dispatch.ip_spoofing_check should work based on the calling chain for RemoteIp.

You should be able to achieve the same effect by setting config.action_dispatch.trusted_proxies to a regex matching all IPv4 addresses.