The Concept of Consumer IP Address Preservation Behind the Load Balancer

Abstract

With the trend of moving all kind of services online, the number of globally connected services and, generally, devices had enormous growth in the last decade. In such an environment, a security becomes a big challenge. There are many network security architectures. However, most of them make a target service to suffer and struggle to maintain the functionalities behind all additional security layers. The first functionalities that are often lost are functionalities based on knowing the original consumer IP address (authentication, geo-location of consumers, etc). The preservation of the original IP addresses is a difficult task and requires advanced routing techniques at the service provider premises. In this paper the concept of advanced routing and network address translation which preserves the original consumer IP address is discussed. The concept involves load balancer, network intrusion detection, and proxy. The concept and the routing techniques will be described in detail. The results of the system implementation and evaluation will be given.