openappsec/attachment

open-appsec is a machine learning security engine that preemptively and automatically prevents threats against Web Application & APIs.

open-appsec Attachments connect between processes that provide HTTP data and the open-appsec Agent security logic.

An attachment gets HTTP data (URL, Header, Body, Response) from a hosting process and delivers it to an open-appsec process known as HTTP Transaction handler.

To deal with potential issues where the HTTP Transaction handler process is not responding, the Attachment implements a retry mechanism and configurable fail-open/fail-close mechanism.

This repository will host Attachments for different platforms. The first one is the open-appsec attachment for NGINX, implemented as a standard NGINX dynamically loadable module (plugin).

We provide an example for compilation instructions on Alpine, the attachment can be complied on other environments that match the environment hosting nginx, yet compilation instructions could need adjustment

The attachment can be compiled to support an existing nginx server or an nginx/ingress-nginxdocker.

Your compilation environment must contain git, docker, cmake, and g++.

Before compiling, ensure the latest development versions of the following libraries:

• PCRE
• libxml2
• zlib
• OpenSSL
• Geoip
• Python3

 apk update
 apk add pcre-dev libxml2-dev zlib-dev openssl-dev geoip-dev linux-headers python3

On your existing nginx server:

1. Run command to extract nginx compilation flags to a file

 nginx -V &> /tmp/nginx.ver

On your compilation environment:

1. Clone this repository
2. Copy the file created on your nginx server (the previous section) to your compilation environment to the path /tmp/nginx.ver
3. Run Configuration script
4. Run CMake command
5. Run make command
6. Run make package command
7. install

 git clone https://github.com/openappsec/attachment.git
 cd attachment
 ./attachments/nginx/ngx_module/nginx_version_configuration.sh --conf /tmp/nginx.ver build_out
 cmake -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=build_out .
 make install
 make package 

The NGINX plugin uses these libraries: shmem_ipc, compression_utils, and nginx_attachment_util. They can be found under the lib directory in the <output path> given to the CMake.

1. Copy the associated libraries to /usr/lib on your existing nginx server
2. Copy the nginx attachment file lib/libngx_module.so to the following path on your existing nginx server: /usr/lib/nginx/modules/
3. Load the attachment on your nginx by adding the following command to the main nginx.conf file: load_module /usr/lib/nginx/modules/libngx_module.so;
4. Restart your nginx server.

Later on, you can push the image to your registry and use it as needed.

For deployment on docker you can deploy it using the same docker command you used before with a regular nginx container, just make sure to add the parameter --ipc=host.

open-appsec/attachment is open source and available under the Apache 2.0 license.