IAP as reverse proxy for AWS web app

Google Cloud Compute Infrastructure
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We have a web app hosted in AWS behind a VPC. Due to product boundaries, user management needs to be done in GCP for the web app.

Would IAP be a good choice for a reverse proxy to the web app? At a high-level, our requirements are:

  • Forward requests for pages that don’t require authentication to the web app (ex. reverse-proxy.com/hello → ex. Blank)

  • Authenticate requests for pages that require authentication and then forward to the web app

  • When forwarding to the web app, attach a unique user id that the web app can use for identifying the user in their own database and for Google Analytics

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  1. Set up IAP:

→ Create an IAP resource in your GCP project.
→ Configure IAP settings such as OAuth consent screen, OAuth client ID, and access settings for your web app.
2) Configure forwarding rules:

→ Define forwarding rules within IAP to direct requests to your web app hosted in AWS based on URL paths.
3) Implement authentication in your web app:

→ Configure your web app to accept requests only from IAP by validating the identity headers added by IAP.
4) Extract and utilize the unique user ID:

→ Modify your web app to extract the unique user ID from the identity headers added by IAP.
→ Use this unique identifier within your web app for user identification and analytics purposes.
5) Test and deploy:

→ Test the configuration thoroughly to ensure that unauthenticated access, authentication, and user identification work as expected.
→ Deploy the changes to your production environment.

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