Can I set up NGINX as a transparent SSL proxy?

Question

Can NGINX be set up as reverse transparent proxy with SSL support? I have a third-party application using HTTPS. For business purposes it is required to log some request data from HTTPS connections.

Solution 1

Yes, you can. http://nginx.org/r/proxy_pass

As you can see from the description of the proxy_pass directive, it allows redirection for both http and https protocols / address schemes.

I would imagine that you can even setup a general-purpose TLS interception device with nginx, through the use of proxy_pass $scheme://$http_host;.

Additionally, you might want to look into OpenBSD relayd, which, as per relayd.conf.5, officially supports "TLS inspection" and "SSL/TLS interception".

Solution 2

short answer is yes. you can use nginx as a reverse proxy. but your use case is not clear.

Comments

[Admin]

What is your use case?

[tetris5]

I have a Web application and a fat client that connects via HTTPS to this application. I need to capture some requests values and log them in a file for compliance purposes. I cannot modify the application. So I am looking for a kind of proxy that will intercept the request on the way and parse it. As the client does not support connections via proxy, the proxy has to be transparent.

[Michael Hampton]

haproxy certainly does it.