01. Introduction

In today’s digital age, cybersecurity has become a critical concern for businesses and individuals alike. As cyberattacks grow more frequent and sophisticated, effective solutions are essential to protect online assets and sensitive information. One such solution is the Web Application Firewall (WAF), a key technology that helps defend against various web-based threats, ensuring the security and availability of web applications.

SafeLine WAF, a leading WAF product, offers powerful protection and intelligent security policies. Today, we’ll dive into the installation process and my experience using SafeLine WAF.

02. Installing SafeLine

The SafeLine WAF Community Edition is free and ideal for personal use, providing a robust security layer for blogs and small websites. The installation process is simple, and with an internet connection, it’s just a single command to complete the setup.

Official Documentation: https://docs.waf.chaitin.com/en/tutorials/install

To install, simply run the following command:

bash -c "$(curl -fsSLk https://waf.chaitin.com/release/latest/setup.sh)"

Once installed, you can access the management interface through port 9443. Configuring the website protection is straightforward—just enter the upstream server details and point your A record to the WAF’s IP address.

03. Basic Protection Configuration

To set up protection:

• Navigate to Protections -> Detection Mod.
• Since I’m running a PHP site, I set high protection for relevant configurations and low protection for unrelated settings. This should slightly improve performance.

You can also check the Attack Events Log to see detailed information about intercepted attacks, tools used, and attack types.

04. Exploring the “Dynamic Protection” Feature

In version 6.0.2, SafeLine introduced the Dynamic Protection feature. This powerful addition dynamically encrypts HTML and JavaScript code each time the site is accessed, making it harder for bots and automated attack scripts to exploit vulnerabilities.

Before enabling:

After enabling: (You'll notice that the source code is now encrypted!)

05. User Experience

Overall, the experience of using SafeLine WAF has been impressive. Here are a few highlights:

• Powerful Protection: SafeLine WAF uses advanced attack detection and blocking technologies to effectively guard against common web attacks such as SQL injection, cross-site scripting (XSS), and cross-site request forgery (CSRF), ensuring web application security.

• Smart Security Policies: Through intelligent learning and data analysis, SafeLine WAF can automatically identify new types of attacks, adjust security strategies dynamically, and reduce false positive rates.

• User-Friendly Interface: SafeLine WAF offers an intuitive management interface that makes it easy for administrators to configure protection rules, manage settings, and monitor attack activity in real-time.

• Stable and Reliable Performance: After extensive testing and large-scale application, SafeLine WAF has proven to be stable and reliable, making it suitable for the security needs of a wide range of organizations.

Feel free to try out SafeLine WAF for your own website, and start improving your site’s security today!