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WAF issues after updating to 9.709-3

FrancWest

Hi,

anyone else noticed that after updating to 9.709-3 Exchange Web Services is not working anymore? We get HTTP Error 500 when connecting to EWS published trhrough WAF. Also, the virtual server changes to orange when this error occurs. Accessing EWS through the browser shows the service page after authentication, but when interacting with EWS by using the Exchange Remote Connectivity Analyzer or EWS Editor generates the HTTP 500 error and the WAF rule turns orange.

When directly connecting to EWS and bypassing UTM works fine and we can interact with EWS.

Before the update everything worked fine.

Franc.



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  • +1

    Sophos support came around and they opened a second case. Last week they implemented a patch for the issue and everything is working again now for us. I don't know the specifics of the fix. They created a development reference number for it: NUTM-13540

    Franc.

  • 0 in reply to FrancWest

    @FrancWest The KB article mentions newer apache version not compatible with non-standard protocols used newer MS products. Is more specific information available?   What nonstandard protocols?  Thank you.

  • 0 in reply to Jay Jay

    I don't know. I didn't write the KB article ;-)

  • +1 in reply to Jay Jay

    It's related to the handling of the '100 Continue' message in the HTTP protocol. This message is sent by a Server after receiving the headers for a request to indicate that it is ready to receive the body of the request from the client - it allows a server to check the headers and potentially reject the request before the client unecessarily sends all the data. Normally, the client would send an additional "Expect:" header to indicate that it is going to wait for the server to send this message before it sends the request body.

    The recent update to Apache changed how this process is handled by the proxy, in a way that didn't work well with Exchange.

    The old behaviour was that the proxy would itself respond to the client with a '100 Continue' and would not wait for the server to do so. The new behaviour of Apache forwards the "Expect:" header to the server and waits for the server to respond with 100 Continue before passing the "100 Continue" to the client. This change defends against potential issues where a client could send a very large request, which the WAF proxy would have to buffer until the server is ready for it.

    The change should be fine for servers that respond to 'Expect' headers and use 100 Continue strictly according to the HTTP specification, but it seems that Exchange does not.

    Changing the configuration option as specified reverts this behaviour so that the proxy itself responds with a "100 Continue" message instead of waiting for the Server to do so. The risk of this behaviour is that the proxy has to buffer the entire body of the request before the server is ready to receive it. This shouldn't be a problem in most situations because request bodies are usually quite small.

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  • +1 in reply to Jay Jay

    It's related to the handling of the '100 Continue' message in the HTTP protocol. This message is sent by a Server after receiving the headers for a request to indicate that it is ready to receive the body of the request from the client - it allows a server to check the headers and potentially reject the request before the client unecessarily sends all the data. Normally, the client would send an additional "Expect:" header to indicate that it is going to wait for the server to send this message before it sends the request body.

    The recent update to Apache changed how this process is handled by the proxy, in a way that didn't work well with Exchange.

    The old behaviour was that the proxy would itself respond to the client with a '100 Continue' and would not wait for the server to do so. The new behaviour of Apache forwards the "Expect:" header to the server and waits for the server to respond with 100 Continue before passing the "100 Continue" to the client. This change defends against potential issues where a client could send a very large request, which the WAF proxy would have to buffer until the server is ready for it.

    The change should be fine for servers that respond to 'Expect' headers and use 100 Continue strictly according to the HTTP specification, but it seems that Exchange does not.

    Changing the configuration option as specified reverts this behaviour so that the proxy itself responds with a "100 Continue" message instead of waiting for the Server to do so. The risk of this behaviour is that the proxy has to buffer the entire body of the request before the server is ready to receive it. This shouldn't be a problem in most situations because request bodies are usually quite small.

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  • 0 in reply to RichBaldry

    Hi
    We too are having this issues with EWS - especially when trying to migrate a mailbox from Exchange on-prem to Exchange online.

    I think I'm going to try out the workaround.

    You said that this "reverts this behaviour". Do you mean that it should work like before the update to 9.709? In other words, if we had no performance issues before the update we should not have any with this workaround?

    Is there a way to activate the "Proxy100Continue Off" option only for specific virtual webservers?

    Thanks!

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