NGINX WAF alternatives: App Protect vs. ModSecurity vs. open-appsec

This page summarizes the projects mentioned and recommended in the original post on dev.to
Waf Nginx modsecurity Appsec Apache

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  • ModSecurity

    ModSecurity is an open source, cross platform web application firewall (WAF) engine for Apache, IIS and Nginx that is developed by Trustwave's SpiderLabs. It has a robust event-based programming language which provides protection from a range of attacks against web applications and allows for HTTP traffic monitoring, logging and real-time analysis. With over 10,000 deployments world-wide, ModSecurity is the most widely deployed WAF in existence.

    • Since Nginx has different use cases, protecting your application depends on how and where you use it. It's recommended that you have a reliable WAF solution since they block most harmful requests in the first place. In this article, you'll compare three tools—ModSecurity, F5 Nginx App Protect, and open-appsec—based on their active development, advanced security features, and open source commitment to help you figure out which tool is right for you.

  • ModSecurity-nginx

    ModSecurity v3 Nginx Connector

    • ModSecurity v3 has also introduced major changes in how ModSecurity works. The entire WAF is not packed together anymore. Instead, the single libmodsecurity engine is paired with a connector module that interfaces the application with the server. Different connectors are available based on the server and are hosted as independent packages. This means that there's a separate ModSecurity v3 Nginx Connector project.

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  • openappsec

    open-appsec is an open-source machine learning security engine that preemptively and automatically prevents threats against Web Application & APIs. It is available for NGINX, NGINX Ingress, Envoy (Soon), Kong (Soon), Ambassador (Soon).

    • open-appsec is under active development, and the code is open source and public. This move allows for regular feature updates and bug fixes by open source developers. The core open-appsec WAF engine is developed in C++ and is available via GitHub.

NOTE: The number of mentions on this list indicates mentions on common posts plus user suggested alternatives. Hence, a higher number means a more popular project.

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