US Patent 11888745 Load balancer metadata forwarding on secure connections

Network devices, such as load balancers may be configured to forward client metadata to back-end nodes using defined fields of a security protocol. For example, client metadata may be inserted into an extension field or certificate defined by a security protocol that is used for a secure connection between the load balancer and the back-end node. In some instances, a source IP address based on a received request may be inserted into the extension field or certificate defined by the security protocol before the request is forwarded to the back-end node. The back-end node may extract the client metadata and use the client metadata for any of a number of processes (e.g., billing, tracking, security, logging, etc.).