PDA

View Full Version : ModSecurity for Apache


llbbl
03-23-2005, 10:16 AM
Has anyone used/using this module ? What are your thoughts about it. Seems to me that what it provides is pretty important if you are concerned about preventing the possiblity of HTTP intrusion.

# Request filtering; incoming requests are analysed as they come in, and before they get handled by the web server or other modules.

# Anti-evasion techniques; paths and parameters are normalised before analysis takes place in order to fight evasion techniques.

# Understanding of the HTTP protocol; since the engine understands HTTP, it performs very specific and fine granulated filtering.

# POST payload analysis; the engine will intercept the contents transmitted using the POST method, too.

# Audit logging; full details of every request (including POST) can be logged for later analysis.

# HTTPS filtering; since the engine is embedded in the web server, it gets access to request data after decryption takes place.


http://www.modsecurity.org/projects/modsecurity/apache/index.html

spankers
03-23-2005, 07:53 PM
Never used it. Seems like it could add a lot of overhead to the web server though.

llbbl
03-24-2005, 05:37 AM
Maybe . Maybe not . How would you test the performance hit that this module might cause?

spankers
03-24-2005, 05:45 AM
The Apache benchmarking tool?
http://httpd.apache.org/docs-2.0/programs/ab.html

You'd have to put a little brain sweat into building a test around the tool, though.

llbbl
03-24-2005, 05:57 AM
Yea i'm not really interested in testing the performance of the tool itself, but benchmarking how much resources it takes to run it is much simpler :)

http://www.thinkingstone.com/talks/Challenges_of_Web_Intrusion_Detection.swf