SafeLine: Open-source web application firewall (WAF)
SafeLine is an open-source and self-hosted Web Application Firewall (WAF) that protects websites from cyber attacks.
“SafeLine WAF was created to protect web applications for small and medium-sized enterprises from cyber threats by monitoring and filtering HTTP/HTTPS traffic. More importantly, with the widespread use of Gen AI, automated website traffic has become increasingly overwhelming, negatively impacting the normal user experience and business operations. Therefore, we aim to create a WAF with robust anti-bot and anti-HTTP flood DDoS attack capabilities,” Ztrix, the product director of SafeLine WAF, told Help Net Security.
SafeLine WAF key features
- Prevent web attacks with low false positive rate: It prevents all types of web attacks, such as SQL injection, XSS injection, OS command injection, CRLF injection, XXE, SSRF, and directory traversal.
- Rate limiting: It defends your web apps against HTTP flood DDoS attacks, brute force attacks, traffic surges, and other types of abuse by throttling traffic that exceeds defined limits.
- Waiting room: It helps manage traffic spikes by queueing excess visitors to mitigate HTTP flood DDoS attacks.
- Anti-bot challenge: It protects your website from bot attacks.
- Authentication challenge: Visitors must enter the password, or they will be blocked.
- Dynamic protection: It dynamically encrypts HTML and JavaScipt code in your web server each time you visit.
Advantages
Compared to cloud-based WAFs, the self-hosted SafeLine WAF offers greater control over configuring and customizing security policies. It ensures that sensitive data stays within the organization’s infrastructure. It can be easily integrated with other self-hosted security systems and is more cost-effective for organizations with large traffic volumes by avoiding ongoing subscription fees associated with cloud services.
“SafeLine detects attacks based on a powerful patented intelligent semantic analysis engine instead of traditional signatures, which makes it detect advanced attacks with very low false positives and false negatives. Many WAFs have high usage barriers, requiring extensive technical knowledge. However, SafeLine WAF can be deployed with a single command and is very easy to use, configure and operate,” Ztrix explained.
“The paid version, SafeLine Pro is moderately priced and more affordable compared to similar solutions from major vendors, making it suitable for small and medium-sized enterprises to address their security needs,” Ztrix added.
Future plans and download
“We plan to enhance and expand SafeLine WAF to incorporate the broader functionalities of a Web Security Gateway. For example, we may implement Identity and Access Management in future versions for more effective user management. We aim to address all the web security problems for our global customers through SafeLine,” Ztrix concluded.
SafeLine WAF is available for free download on GitHub.
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