No doubt, monitoring a WAF is an important thing to do. It helps to find attacks and their sources for forensic purposes and is needed to find false positives as well. How to do it? Citrix NetScaler WAF logs locally, that’s great for real-time logging and trouble shooting, but it may also log to external sources like Citrix Application Delivery Manager (ADM), that’s great for long...
WordPress is one of the most popular web publishing software, both in the private and commercial sectors. While the private sector will hardly use a Citrix NetScaler ADC, not to mention, Citrix Firewall, it is rather common in the commercial world. This page will focus on a simple, robust deployment. It requires advanced (enterprise) or premium (platinum) editions of Citrix NetScaler ADC. It’s...
In my day-to-day work (audits, project management, project oversight, architecture, …), I usually see Citrix NetScaler ADCs administered by someone else. In my audits, one of my first steps is checking for a consistent naming scheme. NetScalers tend to be chaotic if naming is chaotic. Of course, one can argue that the naming of objects is not essential, but for me, it is also a gauge of how...
The problem Funny enough (or frustrating enough), an http-ecv monitor won’t work with JSON-based replies on a Citrix ADC / NetScaler. It will not find any data in an HTTP response and fail. WTF? The reason The http-ecv monitor requires the http-response to be of MIME-Type text (usually text/html). JSON data, however, is application/json. That’s why it does not work. The solution There...
Sometimes, we need specific attributes like an E-Mail address or the userPrincipalName to be passed from a SAML IDP to the SP. If you use a Citrix ADC / NetScaler as SAML IDP, it is, indeed, an easy thing to do. Let’s have a look. Extracting attributes from LDAP The first step, of course, is always to retrieve an attribute from LDAP. This is done via an LDAP policy. I won’t go into...
One of the main concerns that my large customers have is that the Citrix Gateway could fall victim to a DOS or DDOS attack. Linked to this, of course, is the concern that – after a successful attack – it might be possible to bypass authentication or compromise the gateway or the appliance. We have to distinguish between attacks that happen before and those that happen after...
last updated: April 26 2022 I am currently creating a slide deck for a CUGC event on May 11. It will be about securing Citrix (NetScaler) Gateway. During my work, I wanted to find out, what the cookie NSC_VPNERR is good for. After a successful login, its value is set to 3 (Citrix ADC 13.0, it’s not documented). With most of the current browsers, you have to press F12 to see the...
Recently, I had to add a pop-up window to a webpage. It should display every time users from a certain region surfs to this site. In this very case, it’s been information on Putin’s war against Ukraine. My customer’s idea had been to bypassPutin’s ban of information. However, however, did not want to touch each and every page, and it had to be dependent on the country:...
Recently I had a SPAMer here in my blog, who wanted to place his links here. I don’t know why he had chosen this blog, in particular, I also don’t know what he expected from it, because all entries here are moderated. I have always approved all entries, that had been professionally appropriate, but I do not allow SPAM. But, of course, it’s overhead for me. Anyway, no matter why...
last update: July 12th 2022 If someone makes a typing error when entering the domain name, he will not get a valid response. This is a typical example: You can clearly see: The response got an NXDOMAIN status, a non-existing domain. This, however, is not always desired, instead, you might want to return an IP address. It should have looked like this: This time, you see an answer section. The IP...