Reverse Proxy

2 min read

Pronunciation

[ri-vurs prok-see]

Analogy

Think of a reverse proxy as a sophisticated security guard and receptionist for your nodes. Just as a building's receptionist directs visitors to the correct office, screens unwanted visitors, and presents a professional, unified front to the public without revealing the internal office layout, a reverse proxy directs legitimate API requests to appropriate nodes, blocks malicious traffic, and presents a clean, uniform interface to users without exposing your actual architecture.

Definition

A server positioned between infrastructure and the public internet that intercepts and filters incoming requests before forwarding them to the appropriate backend nodes. Reverse proxies enhance infrastructure security, optimize performance through load balancing, and provide protection against various network-based attacks.

Key Points Intro

Reverse proxies provide several critical security and performance benefits for infrastructure.

Key Points

Attack surface reduction: Hides internal node infrastructure details, presenting only a single entry point to potential attackers.

Request sanitization: Validates and filters RPC calls before they reach valuable node resources, blocking malformed or malicious requests.

Load distribution: Balances traffic across multiple nodes to prevent overloading and improve response times during usage spikes.

Caching capability: Stores responses for frequent queries like historical block data, reducing node resource consumption.

Example

Infura, a major infrastructure provider, implements reverse proxy architecture to handle billions of daily API requests. When a dApp developer sends a request to query the latest using Infura's endpoint, a reverse proxy first validates the API key, then routes the request to the least busy in their cluster. The proxy caches the response for several seconds, allowing it to instantly serve the same data to other applications requesting the same information without repeatedly querying the actual nodes.

Technical Deep Dive

-specific reverse proxy implementations typically extend standard web servers like NGINX or HAProxy with custom modules for validation, WebSocket support, and -specific security rules. These proxies often implement based on request patterns, method types, and authentication levels. For enhanced security, many implementations use TLS at the proxy level, allowing internal communications to occur unencrypted for better performance while maintaining encrypted external connections. Advanced configurations employ multiple proxy layers: edge proxies handle DDoS protection and geographic routing, while application-specific proxies manage method-level permissions and request transformation. Some implementations integrate with data indexers to route historical queries to specialized archive nodes while sending write operations to nodes, optimizing for different capabilities.

Security Warning

Misconfigured reverse proxies can create single points of failure in infrastructure. Always implement redundancy with multiple proxy instances, and carefully audit proxy configurations to prevent unintended exposure of sensitive RPC methods. Regular security scans should verify that internal IPs and ports remain unexposed and that request throttling properly activates during attack scenarios.

Caveat

While reverse proxies enhance security and performance, they introduce additional complexity to infrastructure and can become performance bottlenecks if not properly sized for peak traffic. The caching mechanisms, while improving efficiency, may briefly serve stale data during rapid changes, potentially causing issues for applications requiring real-time consistency. Additionally, the centralized nature of proxy infrastructure can contradict 's philosophy if not implemented with sufficient redundancy and geographic distribution.

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