reverse proxy
termnetworkingcloud
A server that receives client requests and forwards them to back-end servers on their behalf.
A reverse proxy is the public face in front of your real servers: it can terminate TLS, balance load, cache, and host a WAF, while the backends stay hidden. Clients talk only to it, which is what makes it such a natural control point.
A forward proxy acts for the client and a reverse proxy acts for the server, and confusing the two makes documentation unreadable. The reverse proxy is the one users never configure and rarely notice: it accepts connections on behalf of servers behind it, so from the outside it simply is the service.
That position is why so much collapses onto it. TLS termination, load balancing, caching, compression, request routing, header manipulation, rate limiting, and web application firewalling all naturally live at the point where every request already passes. Consolidating them there is efficient, and it also means the reverse proxy becomes both the most useful and the most dangerous device in the path.
The subtle risk is disagreement about what a request means. When the proxy parses a request one way and the origin server another, the gap between them is exploitable, which is the basis of request smuggling and a family of related attacks. Anywhere two implementations must agree on parsing, assume attackers will look for the seam.
Also known as: reverse-proxy