HSTS header in policy is NOT sent when redirecting

Hello Thomas,

As your Irule on your http VS directly answer with a redirect (I Think that your policy is trigged in the RESPONSE event), your HTTP_RESPONSE event is never triggered because the redirect is trigged in the Request...

For this case you should build a specific Irule in an HTTP_REQUEST event and use the following command instead :

HTTP::respond 302 noserver Location "; Strict-Transport-Security "max-age=31536000"

You can obtain the correcte header in this request:

curl -I https://mysite.company.com/AppName/ HTTP/1.1 200 Document follows Mime-Version: 1.0 Date: Tue, 03 Apr 2018 18:47:05 GMT Last-Modified: Thu, 01 Dec 2016 15:13:18 GMT Content-Length: 12381 Content-Type: text/html Server: Web Server Strict-Transport-Security: max-age=31536000 X-Frame-Options: SAMEORIGIN Accept-Ranges: bytes

Because the response event is trigged and the policy can insert HSTS header

Regards,

Hello Thomas,

Why you don't insert HSTS header trough the HTTP profile (use in your VS)?

Regards,

Originally, not all sites were ready to have the header inserted and as we share profiles, that would not work. Since all sites are now HTTPS, that could work but the question remains why the redirect seems to bypass the policy.

Actually, I tried a few things but I must be missing something. In v12, there is an HSTS option in the HTTP profile, but I verified that does NOT get inserted when doing a redirect either. When I went to the a valid page that returned 200, I did see my value of the HSTS header. I know as I made it an odd max-age to verify.

Can it really work this way that the only way to add an HSTS header when doing a redirect is to do it manually in the iRule?

BTW, there is no option in the profile to insert a response header—just a request header.

Thanks,

Tom

If you just want to insert it on all responses you can do a simple iRule like this one:

when HTTP_RESPONSE {
HTTP::header insert Strict-Transport-Security "max-age=15552000; includeSubDomains" }

If you want to insert it only when it's missing in the response you could use this iRule:

when HTTP_RESPONSE {
  if { !([ HTTP::header exists "Strict-Transport-Security" ])} { HTTP::header insert "Strict-Transport-Security" "max-age=15552000; includeSubDomains" }}

If you just want to insert it on all responses you can do a simple iRule like this one:

when HTTP_RESPONSE {
HTTP::header insert Strict-Transport-Security "max-age=15552000; includeSubDomains" }

If you want to insert it only when it's missing in the response you could use this iRule:

when HTTP_RESPONSE {
  if { !([ HTTP::header exists "Strict-Transport-Security" ])} { HTTP::header insert "Strict-Transport-Security" "max-age=15552000; includeSubDomains" }}

What are the rules of your policy configured for this?

What are the rules of your policy configured for this?

Dear,

Concerning the processing order, you should note that the iRules are evaluated after the LTM policies: https://support.f5.com/csp/article/K16590

But the event order is also important, iRule based redirect will cause any response based action not to be fired.

So if you're relying a lot more on the LTM policies, I suggest that you perform your redirects via policies as well, and include there the hsts header.

Regards.