Section 1: Introduction

Background

ModSecurity is an open source web application firewall that can work either embedded in an Apache web server or as a reverse proxy. The new features in version 2.0 and version 2.5 (released in February 2008) allow for a highly configurable capability that can address vulnerabilities (e.g. discovered during black-box penetration testing) on a per-application basis. ModSecurity provides for free a broad set of generic Core Rulesets that cover areas such as protocol compliance, malicious client software detection, XML protection, error detection, and generic attack detection ("Detect application level attacks such as described in the OWASP top 10"). However, the Core Set rule documentation (see README in modsecurity-core-rules_2.5-1.6.0.tar.gz) cautions that since attackers may examine the freely-available core rules to get around them, some core rules should be viewed more as a "nuisance reduction" mechanism instead of a security mechanism.

The lessons in WebGoat 5.2 detail over 30 different types of attacks on the WebGoat application (see the WebGoat v5 User & Install Guide).