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Comment by corytheboyd | Hacker News Reader

I’ve been working with WAF rules from OWASP ModSecurity recently and I’m honestly a little worried about it. It seems geared towards “securing” the worlds worst PHP app, but any reasonably good framework and infrastructure will weed out most of what these rules seem to be there to protect against, leading to silly false positives that become a whole lot less silly when it’s Big Customer whose requests are blocked. What do I know though, I’m just the guy who was told we need this. This isn’t advice against using preconfigured WAF rules, just my honest (and I’m sure naive) first impression

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Yes. ModSecurity is best used as a tool for virtual patching, meaning something you can use to create a temporary defence for a problem you know you have. That buys you some time until the problem is fixed.

When you're writing a virtual patch you know exactly what data you're dealing with and you can allow through only what's known to be good. Any other approaches (e.g., generic rules) deal with text in bulk and are prone to false positives.

Even with this narrower focus, it's still a difficult problem. Here's a paper I wrote on this subject a while ago: https://blog.qualys.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/Protocol-...

Source: I am the original author of ModSecurity (but not of any of the rules packages).

Oh yeah I can see the place for it, thanks for filling in that context, and only on HN would the original author of ModSecurity see my comment about it haha!

For my context, I’m coming from a place of adding it to very new deployments, where the needs are constantly changing, which is why it feels a bit square-peg-round-hole I think.

I'm in exactly the same boat, and I 100% agree. The OWASP ModSec rules are insanely naive, and generally your only option when you run into false positives will be to disable the rule altogether.

I think ideally you'd want to use the rules to create some kind of temporal risk score for a given IP / client. Eg, if a single IP hits your service several times in 5 minutes with suspicious requests, then you block the request. But this isn't possible so you basically have to ensure all your rules are only looking for the most obvious and suspicious requests, otherwise you're going to get far too many false positives.

The only argument I could make in favour of using it is a lot of attacks these days are automated and therefore are quite naive because they're simply poking around for holes.

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