So many technologies in one title! Recently I’ve been spending quite a bit of time investigating ModSecurity as a potential replacement Web Application Firewall, and I’ve had some really positive results. The purpose of this post is to share with you how I’ve set this up, so you can do something similar yourself. After all, who wouldn’t want to be alerted to suspicious behaviour on their site in slack:
To help our customers secure their sites and applications — while continuing to give their users reliable online experiences — we’ve built a performant, highly configurable, and comprehensive Web Application Firewall (WAF). In our last post, we shared some of the tech behind our WAF, including how we chose our ruleset and leverage our findings. In order to provide a fully comprehensive solution for securing your infrastructure, it’s critical to continuously test that solution. Because technology and threats are constantly evolving, the rulesets also need to evolve to ensure proper visibility and mitigation into emerging attacks methods.
This is the CRS newsletter covering the period from Early January until today. We held our monthly community chat. We had quite a few people stop by. csanders airween franbuehler lifeforms spartantri dune73 allanbo Our agenda from before the chat is available here. During the chat we discussed the following: Issue #989 status: Currently waiting on canders to fix Dockerfile before it can merged. The Dockerfile’s point to csanders-git’s personal repository instead of CRS repo. This is done in error. csanders will change config default for docker to build on ubuntu and not fedora.
This is the CRS newsletter covering the period from Early December until today (Now in 2018, Happy New Year!!). We held our monthly community chat. We had quite a few people stop by. Special thanks to lifeforms for leading the chat. csanders fzipi spartantri dune73 emphazer fgs franbuehler Our agenda from before the chat is available here. We had a short chat, during the chat we discussed the following: The OWASP CRS Mailing list seemed to be broken for a bit, we confirmed that it is currently working, and who the administrators are (dune73, lifeforms, and csanders) csanders committed to making changes to FTW necessary to get azhao155’s PR’s (and #989 which deals with FTW) merged. A number of folks are testing the Java protections PR that is slotted for 3.1 The Java rules (#990), that are a key feature of 3.1 need some attention We’d like to see correct formatting before merger And a number of FTW tests added for it. There was interest expressed in a format checker script A reminder the required format is available via https://github.com/coreruleset/coreruleset/blob/v3.1/dev/CONTRIBUTING.md OWASP_TOP_10 tags are outdated with new release and will be updated as part of rule cleanup 2.0 The older versions are available here: https://github.com/coreruleset/coreruleset/blob/95e7e6b3982eca93989c7948faca4a961737eace/rules/REQUEST-944-APPLICATION-ATTACK-JAVA.conf A new ticket will be opened taking into account discussions from https://github.com/coreruleset/coreruleset/pull/881/files Dune73 will review #983 and #982 and merge if ready. csanders will write some of the documentation from #986 and provide a space on coreruleset.org for the information to live. #974, which deals with transfer encoding, is awaiting a PR, this change requires both correctly evaluating the TE RFC and the extensions. For 3.1 we’re going to do basic abuse checks in PL and any extension checks will be in PL minimum with further review planned for 3.2. We’d like to add the PR for CPanel exclusion to 3.1, due to how CPanel sets up their system it causes false positives, ideally CPanel would fix this but they haven’t yet so we’ll add a class exclusion similar to how we did with WordPress, Drupal, etc. emphazer said he could take this on. We reviewed spartantri’s idea for filetype checking based on STREAM_INPUT_BODY. It is unclear if this feature will be exposed as part of libmodsecurity. A PR will be prepared with the known compatible stuff enabled and the other stuff commented out and possibly enabled over time. Dune73 discussed a project for a volunteer who would shift rules that only require Phase 1 variables to use the phase:1 action for performance reasons. AppSecEU has been moved from Israel to UK and shifted to match the dev summit two weeks earlier. This would thus be perfect for our planned little CRS summit. @dune73 is in charge of this. dune73 is doing a ModSec/CRS/NGINX webinar with O’Reilly on January 9. Subscription is free, the slides will be shared afterwards. The next community chats will be held on the following dates:
Let me put one thing straight: there are two things when we talk about ModSecurity. There is the naked ModSecurity engine running inside NGINX or Apache and there is the rule set that instructs the engine what to do. Many different rule sets exist. But the rule set with the largest user base (and longest name) is the OWASP ModSecurity Core Rule Set or CRS for short.
Back in August and September, Chaim Sanders introduced FTW, a Framework to Test WAFs via two blost posts. Existing unit testing frameworks are not really suitable for this purpose as they do not grant you enough control over the requests and the ability to look at the WAF log that needs to be bolted on. Chaim teamed with Zack Allen and Christian Peron from Fastly to create this. So FTW was developed with exactly our use case in mind. Time to really understand this and to start using it.
This is the CRS newsletter covering the period from Early November until today. We held our monthly community chat. We had quite a few people stop by. Special thanks to lifeforms for leading the chat. lifeforms emphazer franbuehler spartantri fzipi hamlet_ Our agenda from before the chat is available here. We had a short chat, during the chat we discussed the following: @dune73 will be attending German Open Source Business Awards. Chances look good that CRS will a top performer. More information can be found here Using t:lowercase versus (?i) performance and best practice. There is currently no definitive answer A benchmark can be done using ModSecurity debug logs @spartantri will reach out to contacts to determine best approach for measuring and update us next meeting. There are an excessive amount of open PRs and Issues All but three PRs have been assigned reviewers, we have to make a dent this month. The Java rules, that are a key feature of 3.1 need some attention The older versions are available here: https://github.com/coreruleset/coreruleset/blob/95e7e6b3982eca93989c7948faca4a961737eace/rules/REQUEST-944-APPLICATION-ATTACK-JAVA.conf A new ticket will be opened taking into account discussions from https://github.com/coreruleset/coreruleset/pull/881/files Badging We may remove the gitter badge because we don’t feel big enough for two chats and IRC is preferred (more discussion next chat) We should investigate other functional badges using https://github.com/OWASP/github-template as an example. General question about determine if it is possible to determine if user is accessing via HOSTS file. It is not Travis and FTW PRs assigned to csanders #957 rule split Move part to PL3 to prevent JSON false positives PR #896 awaiting fgs update on the PR we think if the comments were taken into account it would be a quick and nice merge, but for now it’s stalled Fzipi resolved the conflict 896 resolving the conflict on this one The next community chats will be held on the following dates:
The OWASP ModSecurity Core Rule Set Project is very excited about winning one of the OSBAR awards of the German Open Source Business Alliance. The prize is awarded to projects, start-ups and outstanding ideas from the open source environment. The increased attention should make it easier for the award winners to attract users, developers and supporters. CRS hackers Christian Folini and Franziska Bühler with the OSBAR award trophy (photo Fridolin Zurlinden)
Feisty Duck announced two new ModSecurity / Core Rule Set courses: Zurich, February 19/20, 2018 Frankfurt, March 5/6, 2018 Additional trainings in Spring are likely to happen in Geneva and Amsterdam (on popular request). Additionally, teacher Christian Folini, will also be holding a ModSecurity on NGINX Webinar with O’Reilly on January 9. The subscription is no yet online, but will be announced shortly (I plan to update this blog post with the link as soon as it is available).
The new edition OWASP Top Ten list mentions ModSecurity and the OWASP ModSecurity Core Rule Set for the first time. Let me explain you what the Core Rule Set does and how it can help you protect your services from these risks. The CRS - short for OWASP ModSecurity Core Rule Set - is a set of generic attack detection rules. They are meant for use with ModSecurity or compatible web application firewalls. The CRS aims to protect web applications from a wide range of attacks with a minimum of false alerts. The Core Rule Set is thus meant as a 1st line of defense against web application attacks as described by the OWASP Top Ten.