Hey everyone !
I’m looking into spinning up a WAF as the number of services I’m hosting is slowly growing. I want to have a better understanding of the traffic and also have a relative peace of mind that if there is a flaw in one of the services I’m hosting, the WAF could help mitigate it.
I’ve seen two big names come up while searching :
- SafeLine
- BunkerWeb
They are popular and look quite good all around but I don’t want to just mindlessly take the project with the most GitHub stars.
What WAF are you using / have you used ? Which ones do you recommand ?
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I’ve been looking for a good self-hosted WAF for a while. I tried Open AppSec — way too buggy. Then I gave BunkerWeb a shot, but the setup was just too complicated (maybe I’m just not that good 😅). SafeLine has a lot of paid features, but honestly, the Lite version already covers most of what I need. $100/year is pretty reasonable, rich features, the setup and configs are super simple.
I ended up going with Crowdsec.
The setup was a bit of a challenge as I like to do it the RTFM way abd that there is a bunch of concepts to grasp before you really understand what you are doing, but since then it’s been working pretty great ! And it’s free (as in you are providing them with data on the occurence of threats etc, so you don’t pay)
Crowdsec
I just read a bit about it and it sounds quite interesting with the community aspect of it all. I’ll give it a deeper look later, thanks !
I run a custom build of Nginx with a few extra modules compiled in:
- ModSecurity
- Nginx GeoIP2 Module (https://github.com/leev/ngx_http_geoip2_module.git)
- OWASP Core Rule Set: https://github.com/coreruleset/coreruleset/tree/v4.10.0/rules
Some guidance can be found here: https://docs.nginx.com/nginx-waf/admin-guide/nginx-plus-modsecurity-waf-owasp-crs/
That guidance is for NginxPlus, but you can compile the dynamic module yourself with the community versions.
I have been using BunkerWeb for the past 4 years and have been mostly happy with it. Its default settings are sometimes a bit agressive but you can change those globally or service per service.
The fact that they lock Letsencrypt DNS-01 behind the pro version is so incredibly annoying.
Yeah, I use Caddy for that, as I only use DNS-01 for local-only services.
Thanks that’s good to know :)
