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Web Development

RhinoWAF Outperforms ModSecurity with Advanced Security Features

Overview of RhinoWAF's modern features and improvements over Modsecurity

From Hacker News Original Article Hacker News Discussion

RhinoWAF is an open-source, modern Web Application Firewall written in Go, designed to be fast, lightweight, and easier to configure and maintain than legacy WAFs like ModSecurity.

Why it matters: RhinoWAF offers advanced security features (DDoS, XSS, SQLi, HTTP/3 support) with high performance and low resource usage.

The big picture: It improves on traditional WAFs by using JSON configs, hot-reload, browser fingerprinting, adaptive learning, and strict request smuggling detection.

Quick takeaway: RhinoWAF supports OAuth2, CSRF protection, challenge systems (JavaScript, hCaptcha, proof-of-work), comprehensive IP/geolocation rules, and Prometheus metrics for observability.

Commenters say: Users compare RhinoWAF to other open WAFs, ask about ModSecurity rule compatibility, eBPF usage for performance, and ways to generate/validate WAF rules from OpenAPI specs.