last update: April 2023 The problem I recently had to assist designing a portal solution. The customer had an existing solution based on Microsoft ADFS to log on users to ShareFile, Office 365, SAP and similar applications. In addition they used Citrix Gateway (NetScaler Gateway) to publish applications XenApp applications and VDI (XenDesktop) to users. We had to unify the user experience and...
One of the first things you do if you need to secure a web appication using Citrix NetScaler ADC WAF (Web paalication Firewall), is setting the correct profile type. Even though the profile type may bet changed later on, it is a serious decision you have to do. There are two settings: The Profile Type Web Application (HTML) XML Application (XML, SOAP) Web 2.0 Application (HTML, XML, REST)...
There is one thing different about a Citrix ADC WAF (Web Application Firewall) compared to most other features in Citrix ADC: It will affect your whole ADC deployment as soon as you turn it on. It you would, for example, turn on rewriting feature (enable feature RW), it would probably add a microsecond or two to packet processing, but apart from this not affect anything, as there are no policies...
last update: October 2nd 2018 This is the second part of debugging logon. The first one, a network trace about LDAP, may be found here. Citrix ADC / NetScaler logs all events related to AAA (authentication, authorization, auditing) to /tmp/aaad.debug You need to be nsroot or superuser to successfully log on to the BSD shell. This is a requirement to change to BSD shell. Change to the /tmp...
last update: November 3rd 2020 This is the first part of debugging logon problems. The second one, an explanation of aaad.debug log, may be found here. Recently I had to debug LDAP authentication on Citrix ADC / NetScaler and I started digging deeper. I wanted to know how LDAP authentication really works, so I did what I always do in a case like that: I started with a network trace. Attention: in...
How to protect your cookies using Citrix NetScaler Remark: Citrix ADC (NetScaler) firmware version 13 contains cookie theft protection. I recently did a web application firewall (WAF) project for a big company owning and hosting hundreds of websites. They did several penetration tests. One of them focussed on cookies. Citrix NetScaler did a great job protecting cookies, cookie tampering was...
Last update: Nov 21th, 2018 tested using firmware 11.1 If you read about slowloris, you always read about NetScaler doing a great job. Tests in our lab environment show: NetScaler will successfully block these attacks. And there is hardly anything we have to do about it: It’s built into the system. Great news indeed! The only thing we have to do is reduce client idle timeout to a lower...
Let’s talk about a WAF, a Web Application Firewall on a Citrix NetScaler. What’s to be concerned off? Is it worth while considering a NetScaler to be your WAF? I do work for several companies, including Citrix Consulting Services. Recently I worked on some Web Application Firewall projects, so I have some experience on it. Usual concerns will a Citrix NetScaler be really safe WAF? How...
last update: April 16th 2018 I had been asked recently: Johannes, how can we log data about NetScaler Application Firewall policy hits in detail? The standard NetScaler Web Application Firewall log-files NetScaler’s Web Application Firewall logs to /var/log/ns.log. These logs are fine for trouble shooting. There is a good description about these logs here. This is a sample log, stolen from...
last update: 2023/02/03 Tested with NetScaler 11, Citrix ADC 12.1 and 13.0 I needed to use a Citrix ADC (NetScaler) both, as a SAML identity provider (IDP) and service provider (SP). So I set up my test environment accordingly. What my test environment looked like: You see, I created two admin partitions on my Citrix NetScaler ADC, one for the service provider (SP partition), containing both, the...