OctopusWAF: WAF (Web Application Firewall) with High Performance

OctopusWAF is an open-source Web application firewall entirely created in C language that uses libevent to make multiple connections. 

The event-driven architecture is optimized for many parallel connections (keep-alive), vital for high-performance AJAX applications. This tool is very light. You can deploy in any, please. This resource turns perfect for protecting specific endpoints that need custom protection.

Tool features

• Reverse proxy function.
• Detect anomaly using regex using lib PCRE resources.
• Detect security anomaly using algorithms for match string like DFA, horspool or karp-rabin.
• Detect security anomaly using libinjection.
• Options to save log.

Video demo

First step

Install libpcre or libpcre-dev with apt. If you use RPM-based distro, search the name pcre-devel package, on BSD systems search in ports or brew(MacOS)… You Need libevent-dev to run; on RPM distros libevent-devel, you need to install OpenSSL-dev and OpenSSL-devel.

Example in debian based:

$ sudo apt install libssl-dev libevent-dev libpcre3-dev make gcc

To compile and run OctopusWAF, follow these commands:

$ git clone https://github.com/CoolerVoid/OctopusWAF
$ cd OctopusWAF; make
# if you need to see options try the following
$ bin/OctopusWAF

The example tested on DVWA on a simple HTTP channel.

$ bin/OctopusWAF -h 127.0.0.1:7008 -r 127.0.0.1:80 --debug --libinjection-sqli --log results_log.txt

Note you can use pcre, horspool, and libinjection mode protections simultaneously.

Open your browser in http://127.0.0.1:7008, and you can test the block when you attack.

• Notes: Don’t execute with “cd bin; ./OctopusWAF” use full path “bin/OctopusWAF” because binary needs load content in the config directory. Use HTTP only for WAF usage. This version 0.1 runs TLS but doesn’t have a resource to load cert and read TLS requests/responses. If you use TLS, the service can lose the WAF function and work a reverse proxy.

Tested on Linux but can run in FreeBSD.

Code overview

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Language                     files          blank        comment           code
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
C/C++ Header                    14            133            270           9977
C                               13            591            798           2625
make                             2             14              3             52
Markdown                         1             34              0             52
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
SUM:                            30            772           1071          12706
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Future TODO

• Resource to load modsec rules https://github.com/SpiderLabs/owasp-modsecurity-crs/
• Resource to use NLP and try to classify payload to block using machine learning (KNN or naive Bayes)
• Insert new regulations to detect XSS
• Insert new rules to detect SQLi
• Insert new rules to see RCE
• Insert new rules to detect RFI/LFI
• Insert new rules to detect XXE
• Insert new rules to detect Anomalies.
• Channel for TLS
• Cert Load
• Issues.