Forum Discussion

Mike_Maher's avatar
Mike_Maher
Icon for Nimbostratus rankNimbostratus
Oct 12, 2011

ASM Policy for Active Sync 2010

We are currently migrating from Active Sync 2003 to 2010 and we are running traffic through an ASM version 10.2.0 HF2. The issue we are seeing is that the in 2010 apparently they have gone to doing some sort of base64 encoding of the parameters on the POSTs. See below for 2003 vs 2010 requests.

 

 

Active Sync 2003 Request

 

POST /Microsoft-Server-ActiveSync?User=test&DeviceId=1ED56AD0A2C0E3A652E364AB72614D4D&Devi

 

ceType=SmartPhone&Cmd=GetItemEstimate HTTP/1.1

 

 

Active Sync 2010 Request

 

POST /Microsoft-Server-ActiveSync?jAkJBBAe1WrQosDjplLjZKtyYU1NBAAAAAACU1A= HTTP/1.1

 

 

So the problem we are having is that obviously the encoded string is being seen as a parameter and changes all the time, so we would need to turn off parameter checking to make this work.

 

 

Has anyone had experience with working with ASM and Active Sync 2010 and making parameter checking work with the base64 encoded query string. Any suggestion would be appreciated. Thanks

 

 

Mike

 

APM
app sec
security

2 Replies

Sort By
  • BT_90520's avatar
    BT_90520
    Icon for Nimbostratus rankNimbostratus
    Oct 16, 2011
    looks like we can have some iRule to decode it but not ideal for each request and eat up performance too?

     

    @ http://devcentral.f5.com/wiki/iRules.b64decode.ashx

     

     

    I also saw below sentences for renegotiation and "MAY" means we can use back w/o encoding but this may need some rewriting in server responses. But then again, I am not totally sure if there are other implication since there can be other sync object involved. See http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc425499(v=EXCHG.80).aspx

     

     

    @ http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee238027(v=EXCHG.80).aspx

     

    "In addition to the HTTP POST request/response commands, the HTTP OPTIONS command response provides the supported ActiveSync capabilities of the server, including supported protocol versions and commands."

     

     

    @ http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee157438(v=EXCHG.80).aspx

     

    "Messages are transported by using HTTPPOST and HTTP OPTIONS, as specified in [RFC2616]. The query parameters in the request URI MAY be encoded with base64 encoding (see section 2.2.1.1.1.1). "