I’ve spent a good chunk of the last three months hacking away at ModSecurity compatibility with FreeWAF, and thanks to some employer sponsorship and noise from the community, there is enough feature-completeness and stability that it’s ready to sit as the latest tagged release. The project also wears a shiny new name tag: lua-resty-waf.
freewaf
FreeWAF Updates and New Features
January tends to be a pretty quiet month in the admin/operations world. Most people are still coming back from holiday, new yearly plans are being made, meetings are held, and the server monkeys… sit and watch the graphs scroll by. The rest of the world’s gradual return to work means the start of a seasonal upswing, but we’re still in a relatively low point, so that generally means a light workload. That extra free time has given me a chance to put in a good chunk of work towards FreeWAF, cleaning up code, adding new features, and interacting with a total stranger (score!). I’ve just tagged a new release, v0.4, which provides a handful of new features that were sorely missing:
Fake Googlebot WordPress Login Bruteforce
… sigh.
A few hours ago we started seeing an interesting trend. A highly distributed set of clients is attempting to authenticate to WordPress sites using a very distinct pattern. Captures and initial analysis below.
FreeWAF: A High-Performance, Scalable, Open Web Firewall
I’ve spent the better part of the last six months reworking the project I wrote for my Master’s thesis. The idea behind the project was to explore the costs, risks and requirements associated with developing a cloud WAF infrastructure, similar to what commercial cloud security providers like Cloudflare and Incapsula provide- and then provide that service free of charge. Totally unsustainable, of course, but as an academic exercise it was an incredibly educating experience. I’ve since decided to focus on releasing the source of the firewall engine powering the service, continuing to develop features and exploring new methods of anomalous and malicious behavior detection.