From 0 to 16K Stars: The Fastest Growing Open Source WAF

Tired of maintaining endless regex rules in traditional WAFs? Meet SafeLine, a free and open source Web Application Firewall with a semantic detection engine, dynamic protection, and over 16.4K GitHub stars. It’s built for real-world attacks—and it's free and open-source.

🔄 Dynamic Protection: Scramble Your Frontend, Every Time

SafeLine can dynamically obfuscate HTML and JS on each page load, making your source code unreadable to crawlers and bots.

• /admin/login becomes a random encrypted path like /a8c9f1, and changes every refresh
• Real users see no difference. Crawlers see... nothing.

🧪 BurpSuite Test Result:

Crawler blocked from indexing. Browser loads normally. Extra latency: ~1ms.

💡 You can apply this selectively:

• Encrypt only admin paths
• Whitelist static files (CSS/JS) to avoid layout issues

🤖 Bot Blocking That Actually Works

SafeLine doesn't rely on User-Agent headers. It verifies browser behavior:

• JS execution
• Fingerprinting
• Mouse movement

🚫 Bots fail.

✅ Humans pass once, then proceed freely.

🧪 Tested: A Python script was blocked after 3 requests. The IP was locked for 30 mins. No CAPTCHA required.

You can tweak thresholds and customize the lock screen.

🧠 Semantic Detection: Not Just Rule Matching

SafeLine doesn’t use static signatures. It understands what the payload is trying to do.

• Detects SQL injection like 1 AND 1=1, even if obfuscated
• Blocks XSS via DOM-aware context, not pattern matching

🧪 Benchmark:

• 33,669 requests tested
• 575 malicious payloads
• ✅ Detection rate: 71.65%
• ❌ False positives: 0.07%
• ⚡ Avg Latency: 1ms, >2000 TPS per core

🧱 Security for Admin Panel Access

• RBAC: Give ops read-only, engineers full control
• 2FA: TOTP-based, works with Microsoft Authenticator
• CLI fallback: docker exec safeline-mgt resetadmin if you lose 2FA

🔬 Real-World Lab: WebGoat + SafeLine

docker run -d -p 8080:8080 registry.cn-shanghai.aliyuncs.com/kubesec/webgoat:v2023.8

Then reverse-proxy it via SafeLine under webgoat.test.

🧪 Test Attacks

• SQLi: ?id=1 UNION SELECT * FROM users → Blocked
• XSS: <img src=x onerror=alert(1)> → Blocked

⚠️ Troubleshooting Tips

🛠 Hardware: 2C/4G recommended for <1ms latency.

🚀 Final Thoughts

SafeLine isn't just another regex-based WAF. It's:

• Free & open source
• No signature maintenance
• Semantic detection that works
• Handles 2000+ TPS/core

If you're running a self-hosted app or CTF challenge, this is the WAF to try.

🔗 Links

• 🌐 GitHub Repository
• 📚 Official Docs
• 💬 Discord Community