Brief History 3
coded functionality, because real life is so complex that everyone needs to do things
just slightly differently. ModSecurity achieves flexibility by giving you a powerful rule
language, which allows you to do exactly what you need to, in combination with the
ability to apply rules only where you need to.
Passiveness
ModSecurity will take great care to never interact with a transaction unless you tell it
to. That is simply because I didn’t trust a tool, even the one I built, to make decisions
for me. That’s why ModSecurity will give you plenty of information, but ultimately
leave the decisions to you.
Predictability
There’s no such thing as a perfect tool, but a predictable one is the next best thing.
Armed with all the facts, which you will find in the reference manual, the posts on
the ModSecurity Blog, or here, you can understand ModSecurity’s weak points and
work around them.
Feature quality over quantity
Over the course of six years spent working on ModSecurity, we came up with many
ideas for what ModSecurity could do. We didn’t act on most of them. We kept them
for later. Why? Because we understood that we have limited resources available at our
disposal and that our minds (ideas) are far faster than our implementation abilities.
We chose to limit the available functionality, but do really well at what we decided
to keep in.
There are bits in ModSecurity that fall outside the scope of these four principles. For exam-
ple, ModSecurity can change the way Apache identifies itself to the outside world, confine
the Apache process within a jail, and even implement an elaborate scheme to deal with an
once-infamous universal XSS vulnerability in Adobe Reader. Although it was I who added
those features, I now think that they detract from the main purpose of ModSecurity, which
is a reliable and predictable tool that allows for HTTP traffic inspection.
Brief History
Like many other open source projects, ModSecurity started out as a hobby. Software devel-
opment had been my primary concern back in 2002, when I realized that producing secure
web applications is virtually impossible. As a result, I started to fantasize about a tool that
would sit in front of web applications and control the flow of data in and out. The first ver-
sion was released in November 2002, but a few more months were needed before the tool
became useful. Other people started to learn about it, and the popularity of ModSecurity
started to rise.
Property of Phyllis J. Henderson <kenni.star@hcedns.net>