I have a question about distinguishing user in HTTP.
I opened wireshark and web browser, started wandering in web pages on some known website. and noticed that my PC opened several TCP connections and on each connection there are several HTTP request\response.
My main goal is to identify user that wandering in my website (for example)
at first, I thought of finding matching response for each request but it is not trivial as I have done alot of reading about it. specially if there are several TCP connections for one user.
I also thought of identify user by its source port\ip- but there are several TCP connection for one user and there are more than one user (some of them might be beyond NAT).
So my question is how can I identify\isolate all the http requests\responses from one user given:
there are more that one user
some of them might connected to NAT
each user open several TCP connections for the "main" HTTP request
cookies might change during session
Is there some sniffer or library that already has this ability of distinguish between users (this http request\response belongs to that user)?
This process suppose to run on the fly.
Thanks alot.
Related
Are there any general rules on when a website sends out a TCP reset, triggering the Connection reset by peer error?
Like
too many open connections
too high bandwidth use
connected for too long
…?
I'm pretty certain that there is no law governing this and that different websites/web developers have different tastes, but I would be interested if there are some general rule sets (from websites or textbooks on the subject or what you have been taught in school/at work) that are mostly followed.
Reason why I'm asking, of course, is that I want to get around being blocked…
I'm downloading some government data that is freely available, but is lacking an API or something, so the two official ways to get it are either clicking around in some web-GIS a few thousand times or going along the Kafkaesque path of explaining various levels of clerks the concepts of databases, csv files, zip files and that you can't (and won't need to, if they'd just did what you try to explain them) just drive to their agency with a "giant" harddrive, so I'm trying to just go the most resource saving way for everyone involved…
A website is not "sending" a "Connection reset by peer" error. This error is generated by the OS kernel on the client site if it gets a TCP reset for an active connection. There are many reasons this TCP reset might be sent. A TCP reset might be sent by design from some kind of load limit, for example to limit the number of connections from the same IP address within a specific time as a form of DOS protection, to restrict data scraping or to enforce some kind of fair use. There is no general rule or even law for this kind of explicit limits.
A TCP reset might also be caused by the application being overloaded, application crashing, system running out of resources ... .
And a TCP reset will happen if the client writes to a connection which the server already considers as closed. This can happen for example with HTTP keep alive: the server might close the connection on inactivity at any time after the HTTP response was sent. If the client sends a new request on the same connection at the same time the server closes the connection, the server will reject the new request (since the connection is closed on the server end) and will send a TCP RST, causing a connection reset by peer at the client. The client needs to properly handle this situation by creating a new connection and sending the request again (provided that the request was not state changing, i.e. is idempotent).
I have an ASP.NET Web API application running behind a load balancer. Some clients keep an HTTP busy connection alive for too much time, creating unnecessary affinity and causing high load on some server instances. In order to fix that, I wish to gracefully close a connection that is doing too much requests in a short period of time (thus forcing the client to reconnect and pick a different server instance) while at same time keeping low traffic connections alive indefinitely. Hence I cannot use a static configuration.
Is there some API that I can call to flag a request to "answer this then close the connection" ? Or can I simply add the Connection: close HTTP header that ASP.NET will see and close the connection for me?
It looks like the good solution for your situation will be the built-in IIS functionality called Dynamic IP restriction. "To provide this protection, the module temporarily blocks IP addresses of HTTP clients that make an unusually high number of concurrent requests or that make a large number of requests over small period of time."
It is supported by Azure Web Apps:
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/confirming-dynamic-ip-address-restrictions-in-windows-azure-web-sites/
If that is the helpful answer, please mark it as a helpful or mark it as the answer. Thanks!
I am not 100% sure this would work in your situation, but in the past I have had to block people coming from specific IP addresses geographically and people coming from common proxies. I created an Authorized Attribute class following:
http://www.asp.net/web-api/overview/security/authentication-filters
In would dump the person out based on their IP address by returning a HttpStatusCode.BadRequest. On every request you would have to check a list of bad ips in the database and go from there. Maybe you can handle the rest client side, because they are going to get a ton of errors.
Write an action filter that returns a 302 Found response for the 'blocked' IP address. I would hope, the client would close the current connection and try again on the new location (which could just be the same URL as the original request).
When user holds refresh button , url is sent to the server as many times as it makes my woker process hang
is there is any feature in the iis to handle the user request ( when the same request is sent is short interval of time )
Not in IIS itself. It is designed to answer requests as they come. The options available are more related for looking for DDOS attacks.
You still want to be able to handle this kind of traffic generally, whether it comes from a single user or not. If the process hangs, look for code that is not destroying objects when done with them. Disposable objects that don't have their Disposable methods called before they are nulled. SqlConnection or other database connection that is left open.
You have to be careful because it is possible that legitimate requests could be blocked by using software and settings, especially when a number of computers are using a site behind a network router as they can all appear as a single IP address, the address of the modem for that network (as in the case of small businesses that tend to use residential routers and ISP setups).
I am trying to create a Web Server of my own and there are several questions about working of Web servers we are using today. Questions are:
After receiving a HTTP request from a client through port 80, does server respond using same port 80?
If yes then while sending a large file say a pic in MB's, webserver will be unable to receive requests from other clients?
Is a computer port duplex or simplex? (Can it send and receive at the same time)?
If another port on server side is used to send response to client, then (if TCP is used, which is generally used), again 3-way handshaking will be done which will be overhead...
http://beej.us/guide/bgnet/output/html/singlepage/bgnet.html here is a good guide on what's going on with webservers, although it's in c but the concepts are all there. This will explain the whole client server relationship as well as some implementation details.
I'll just give a high level on what's going on:
Usually what happens is when your server gets a new request that comes in it creates a fork that will process it, that way you are not bogged down by each request, when the request comes in the child process is handed a new file to write to(again this is all implementation details).
So really you have one server waiting for requests and for each request it received it spawns a child to process to deal with this request. I'm sure there are much easier languages to implement this stuff than c(I had to do both a c and java server serving to either one in my past) but c really gets you to understand the things that are going on and I'm betting that is what you are looking for here
Now there are a couple of things to think about:
how you want the webserver to work. The example explains the parent child process.
Do you want to use tcp/UDP there are differences in the way to payload gets delivered.
You don't have to connect on port 80. that's just the default for web.
Hopefully the guide will help you.
Yes. The server sends the response using the TCP connection established by the client, so it also responds using the same port. The server can handle connections from multiple clients using the same port because TCP connections are identified by (local-ip, local-port, remote-ip, remote-port), so the server can even handle multiple connections from same client provided that the source ports are different.
There are different techniques you can use to be able to serve multiple clients at the same time. These include
using multiple processes or threads: when one is busy serving a client the others can serve other clients.
using events: the server listens for events from the OS: when it can write a block of data to a connection it writes it, when a new client connects it accepts the connection, ...
Frequently both approaches are be combined.
A TCP connection is duplex: you can send and receive at the same time. The HTTP protocol is based on a simple request-response model though: at any given time only one party is "talking."
I have found this tool online: http://www.unleashnetworks.com/products/unsniff.html
How does this work? Are they assuming that all HTTP traffic for a session occurs in the same TCP session, and then just clumping all that data together? Is that a safe assumption?
I was under the impression that when I load a page, multiple TCP sessions could be running for that single page load (images, videos, flash, whatever).
This seems to get complicated when I think about having two browser tabs open that are loading pages at the same time..how could I differentiate one http "session" from another? Especially true if they are hitting the same page, right?
For that matter, how does the browser know which data incoming belongs to which tab? Does it keep track of TCP sessions belonging to an individual tab?
Edit:
When HTTP session is mentioned above, I am referring to all of the related HTTP transactions that it takes to, say, load a page.
By TCP session, I am literally referring to the handshake's SYN -> FIN packet lifetime.
Although it might not be visible, the HTTP Session tracker is being passed to the server from the client as a parameter or as e cookie (header)
You might need to read about HTTP session token
A session token is a unique identifier that is generated and sent from a server to a client to identify the current interaction session. The client usually stores and sends the token as an HTTP cookie and/or sends it as a parameter in GET or POST queries. The reason to use session tokens is that the client only has to handle the identifier—all session data is stored on the server (usually in a database, to which the client does not have direct access) linked to that identifier. Examples of the names that some programming languages use when naming their HTTP cookie include JSESSIONID (JSP), PHPSESSID (PHP), and ASPSESSIONID (ASP).
I am not familiar with the "Unsniff" app you link to, but I have used a few packet sniffers before (my favorite is Wireshark). Usually you can differentiate sessions based on what host they are connected to. So, for instance, if you have 2 tabs open and one is opened to www.google.com and the other is www.facebook.com, the packet sniffer should be able to tell you which session is pointed at which host (or at least give you an IP address, which you can then use to find the host. see: reverse lookup).
Most times, multiple HTTP sessions will be open to one host. This is the case when you're loading a site's various resources (CSS files, images, javascript, etc.). Each of these resources will show up as a separate HTTP session (unless, of course, the connection is persistent... but your sniffer should be able to separate them anyway). In this case, you (or the sniffer) will need to determine what was downloaded by looking at the actual data within the HTTP packet.