It's well known that websites are one of the most prevalent forms on the internet today. With the rise of open-source web frameworks and various site-building tools, creating a website has become incredibly cost-effective. However, one crucial aspect often gets overlooked: website security. Many are still unfamiliar with the concept of a Web Application Firewall (WAF).
1. What is a WAF?
A WAF, or Web Application Firewall, is a security measure designed to protect your website from malicious attacks. Unlike traditional firewalls, a WAF operates at the application layer and typically functions as a web gateway, acting as a reverse proxy. It can identify and block common web attacks such as SQL injection, cross-site scripting (XSS), cross-site request forgery (CSRF), server-side request forgery (SSRF), WebShell uploads, and more.
Today, I want to introduce you to a user-friendly and highly effective WAF tool: SafeLine.
2. What is SafeLine?
SafeLine is a simple, easy-to-use, and widely praised community WAF project. It’s a web gateway built on Nginx, functioning as a reverse proxy that filters out malicious traffic from hackers and protects your website from attacks.
- Official Website: https://waf.chaitin.com
- GitHub: https://github.com/chaitin/safeline
3. Installation and Deployment
SafeLine uses containerized deployment, with services composed of multiple Docker containers. The developers have provided an installation script to make setup incredibly easy. As long as your server is connected to the internet, the script will automatically pull the necessary images, initialize configuration files, and start the service.
You can clone the repository and run the setup.sh script to install SafeLine:
bash
git clone git@github.com:chaitin/safeline.git
cd safeline
bash ./setup.sh
Alternatively, you can use the online installation script:
bash
bash -c "$(curl -fsSLk https://waf.chaitin.com/release/latest/setup.sh)"
After installation, follow the instructions to access the local web service port and start using SafeLine.
4. How SafeLine Works
Here’s a basic overview of how SafeLine operates. When an external user sends a request, it travels through the network to the web server. If the user happens to be a malicious actor, their attack requests will also reach the web server.
SafeLine acts as a reverse proxy, intercepting the traffic before it hits the web server. It detects and cleanses malicious activity within the traffic, ensuring that only safe, clean traffic is forwarded to the web server.
This process effectively filters out harmful requests before they can reach your server, safeguarding your site from external attacks.
5. Core Capabilities
- Protection Against Web Attacks, CC Attacks, and Bots
SafeLine’s web attack detection is powered by a semantic analysis algorithm. Unlike typical semantic analysis, SafeLine’s automata engine, Yanshi, supports fragment grammar analysis and automated recursive decoding of HTTP request parameters. It extracts attack fragments within the parameters and uses a scoring model to identify malicious code, determining whether an HTTP request is a malicious attack. SafeLine can protect against common attacks and even detect 0Day attacks without predefined rules.
SafeLine also integrates algorithms for human-bot verification based on malicious IP intelligence, client fingerprints, mouse and keyboard behavior recognition, and access frequency limitations, making it effective against bots, scanners, and CC attacks.
- Web Traffic Access Control
SafeLine supports configuring access control blacklists and whitelists for your site through a visual interface, allowing you to match conditions like source IP, Path, Domain, Header, and Body.
- Website Resource Identification
SafeLine automatically identifies web resources based on HTTP traffic, generating API profiles for continuous analysis. It uses dynamic baselines and predictive analysis to detect abnormal access behavior, accurately identifying attacks that appear normal but are actually malicious.
6. Key Features
Easy Installation, Simple Usage
Installation requires just a single command, and the interface is user-friendly. SafeLine offers top-tier security capabilities right out of the box, so you don’t need a deep security background to achieve excellent protection.Robust Security Capabilities
The semantic analysis-driven web attack detection algorithm is a proprietary technology created by Chaitin Tech and is highly recognized in the security industry. SafeLine also features advanced protection capabilities typically found in enterprise-level products, including IP threat intelligence, dynamic rate limiting, and intelligent modeling.High Performance, High Stability
By adding attack detection capabilities on top of Nginx, SafeLine easily supports traffic loads of 10,000+ TPS. It can scale with hardware upgrades, and the attack detection introduces only minimal latency, measured in milliseconds.
With these powerful features, SafeLine WAF offers a simple yet robust solution to ensure your website is protected against a variety of cyber threats.
- Website: https://waf.chaitin.com
- GitHub: https://github.com/chaitin/safeline
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