You will mostly and always have to do all the configurations by yourself, and things sometimes get very tangled.Īnother disadvantage comes in the user-friendliness. Since open-source WAFs are “freely” accessible, you are not going to get very lucky with configuration and troubleshooting. You are able to add various modules as you wish. This means that they are highly customizable and will allow you to perform configurations as per your project needs, and they will work absolutely fine. Open-source WAFs offer great flexibility.

If you do not want to spend huge amounts of cash on high-end WAFs, your best bet would be to acquire one of the most common and trusted WAFs such as ModSecurity. The biggest advantage of open-source WAFs is that they are so much more affordable when compared to proprietary WAFs. Let’s consider some advantages and disadvantages of open-source WAFs. Some WAFs are open-source while others are proprietary. A WAF can either be a server plugin, appliance or filter and can be used to protect various web applications from attacks such as cross-site scripting (XSS) or SQL injection (SQLi).

Waf in networking