TrafficCop

TrafficCop is super simple way of analyzing incoming traffic and imposing rules or policies on requests.

TrafficCop was initially created as a means of combatting website referral spam (read more about it on my blog here) but its application can also be used for other means such as traffic shaping or IP blocking/white listing.

Getting Started

Getting started with TrafficCop is painless. After referencing the source .dll in your ASP.NET MVC project (NuGet package is on its way!) follow the following steps.

Step 1: Create a custom TrafficCop registry

Before setting up TrafficCop you must first create a custom registry and register it with TrafficCop.

A TrafficCop Registry is a simply class that you use to register your traffic policies/rules via the RegisterRoutePolicy() method as demonstrated below.

public class YourCustomRegistry : TrafficCopRegistration
{
    public YourCustomRegistry()
    {
        this.RegisterRoutePolicy(new BlockBadWebsitePolicy());
        this.RegisterRoutePolicy(new RedirectReallyBadWebsitePolicy());
    }
}

Step 2: Create your custom traffic policy

A policy is a set of rules that once registered gets enforced on incoming HTTP traffic. The following action demonstrates how you could block all incoming traffic from the IP address of 22.231.113.64. You can implement your own rules within the Match() method using the properties within the IRequestContext parameter.

public class BlockBadWebsitePolicy : TrafficCopRoutePolicy
{
    public override bool Match(IRequestContext requestContext)
    {
        bool isBadTraffic = (requestContext.IpAddress == "22.231.113.64");
        return isBadTraffic;
    }

    public override void MatchAction(object actions)
    {
        var act = actions as TrafficCopActions;
        if (act != null) act.PageNotFound404();
    }
}

The MatchAction method is called when the traffic within your Match method is successfully matched. By default there are a set of actions available via the supplied TrafficCopActions paramter, however custom actions can be added by extending the TrafficCopActions base class.

The default actions are:

• MovedPermanently301(string redirectUrl)
• Forbibben403()
• PageNotFound404()
• PageNotFound404(string redirectUrl)
• Gone410()

Step 3: Register your custom traffic policy

Once you've created your custom policy you need to register it with your custom registry using the ``RegisterRoutePolicy` method (see in Step 1).

...
public YourCustomRegistry()
{
    this.RegisterRoutePolicy(new BlockBadWebsitePolicy());
}
...

Step 4: Add your registry to TrafficCop and register with your application

The final step to setting up TrafficCop now that you've created your custom registry and policies is to add your registration to TrafficCop and reference it in your application. To do this edit your Global.asax.cs and call TrafficCop.Register(new YourCustomRegistry()); within the Application_Start method, like so:

protected void Application_Start()
{
    ...
    TrafficCop.Register(new YourCustomRegistry());
    ...
}

Now all we need to do is run the policies against your incoming traffic using the TrafficCop.Watch method by calling it within the Application_BeginRequest method within Global.asax.cs.

protected void Application_BeginRequest()
{
    TrafficCop.Watch();
}

License

All files are under the The MIT License (MIT) license.