Security considerations

Client IP address

IP address is an extremely common rate limit key, so it is important to configure correctly, especially in the equally-common case where Django is behind a load balancer or other reverse proxy.

Django-Ratelimit is not the correct place to handle reverse proxies and adjust the IP address, and patches dealing with it will not be accepted. There is too much variation in the wild to handle it safely.

This is the same reason Django dropped SetRemoteAddrFromForwardedFor middleware in 1.1: no such “mechanism can be made reliable enough for general-purpose use” and it “may lead developers to assume that the value of REMOTE_ADDR is ‘safe’.”


Mishandling client IP data creates an IP spoofing vector that allows attackers to circumvent IP ratelimiting entirely. Consider an attacker with the real IP address that adds the following to a request:


A misconfigured web server may pass the header value along, e.g.:


Alternatively, if the web server sends a different header, like X-Cluster-Client-IP or X-Real-IP, and passes along the spoofed X-Forwarded-For header unchanged, a mistake in ratelimit or a misconfiguration in Django could read the spoofed header instead of the intended one.


There are two options, configuring django-ratelimit or adding global middleware. Which makes sense depends on your setup.


Writing a small middleware class to set REMOTE_ADDR to the actual client IP address is generally simple:

def reverse_proxy(get_response):
    def process_request(request):
        request.META['REMOTE_ADDR'] = # [...]
        return get_response(request)
    return process_request

where # [...] depends on your environment. This middleware should be close to the top of the list:

    # ...

Then the @ratelimit decorator can be used with the ip key:

@ratelimit(key='ip', rate='10/s')

Ratelimit keys

Alternatively, if the client IP address is in a simple header (i.e. a header like X-Real-IP that only contains the client IP, unlike X-Forwarded-For which may contain intermediate proxies) you can use a header: key:

@ratelimit(key='header:x-real-ip', rate='10/s')

Brute force attacks

One of the key uses of ratelimiting is preventing brute force or dictionary attacks against login forms. These attacks generally take one of a few forms:

  • One IP address trying one username with many passwords.
  • Many IP addresses trying one username with many passwords.
  • One IP address trying many usernames with a few common passwords.
  • Many IP addresses trying many usernames with one or a few common passwords.


Unfortunately, the fourth case of many IPs trying many usernames can be difficult to distinguish from regular user behavior and requires additional signals, such as a consistent user agent or a common network prefix.

Protecting against the single IP address cases is easy:

def login_view(request):

Also limiting by username provides better protection:

def login_view(request):

Using passwords as key values is not recommended. Key values are never stored in a raw form, even as cache keys, but they are constructed with a fast hash function.

Denial of Service

However, limiting based on field values may open a denial of service vector against your users, preventing them from logging in.

For pages like login forms, consider implementing a soft blocking mechanism, such as requiring a captcha, rather than a hard block with a PermissionDenied error.

Network Address Translation

Depending on your profile of your users, you may have many users behind NAT (e.g. users in schools or in corporate networks). It is reasonable to set a higher limit on a per-IP limit than on a username or password limit.

User-supplied Data

Using data from GET (key='get:X') POST (key='post:X') or headers (key='header:x-x') that are provided directly by the browser or other client presents a risk. Unless there is some requirement of the attack that requires the client not change the value (for example, attempting to brute force a password requires that the username be consistent) clients can trivially change these values on every request.

Headers that are provided by web servers or reverse proxies should be independently audited to ensure they cannot be affected by clients.

The User-Agent header is especially dangerous, since bad actors can change it on every request, and many good actors may share the same value.