lua-resty-waf – High Performance WAF Built on the OpenResty Stack

lua-resty-waf is a high performance web application firewall (WAF) written for the OpenResty stack, leveraging the scalable architecture of Nginx, while providing a ModSecurity compatible rule syntax as well as a few custom rules built during initial development and testing, and a small virtual patchset for emerging threats. This allows users to move their ModSecurity WAF installations to the OpenResty ecosystem.

OpenResty is a full-fledged web platform that integrates the standard Nginx core, LuaJIT, Lua libraries, many high quality 3rd-party Nginx modules, and most of their external dependencies.

lua-resty-waf uses the Nginx Lua API to analyze HTTP request information and process against a flexible rule structure. Additionally, lua-resty-waf is distributed with tooling to automatically translate existing ModSecurity rules, allowing users to extend lua-resty-waf implementation without the need to learn a new rule syntax.

Features include:

• Analyze any aspect of an HTTP request or response for anomalous behaviors.
• Mitigate brute-force attacks to any request resource.
• Use real-time DNS blacklists to deny known malicious hosts.
• Protection from malicious automated bots and data harvesting services.
• Send audit event logs to a remote TCP/UDP/syslog server.
• Monitoring of interactive platform functionality, such as blog comments, for spam, DDoS, and vulnerability exploit.
• Behavioral analysis of traffic based on hit rate and request target.
• Use memcached or redis to store long-term variables.

lua-resty-waf was started by Robert Paprocki for his Master’s thesis at Western Governor’s University.

Website: github.com/p0pr0ck5/lua-resty-waf
Support:
Developer: Robert Paprocki and contributors
License: GNU General Public License v3.0

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