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WAF: Introduction

Iridium includes a built-in Web Application Firewall (WAF) that helps protect your web applications from common threats and vulnerabilities. The WAF can be configured to block or allow specific types of traffic based on predefined rules.

  • Blocking User-Agents: You can block requests from specific User-Agent strings to prevent access from known malicious bots or crawlers.
  • Rate Limiting: The WAF can limit the number of requests from a single IP address within a specified time frame.
  • Blocking IPs/CIDRs: You can block requests from specific IP addresses (1.2.3.4) or CIDR ranges (1.2.3.0/24) to prevent access from known malicious sources.

Iridium can block requests based on the User-Agent header. For simplicity, you can block pre-defined libraries, tools, and crawlers by using the block_libraries or block_crawlers options.

The block_empty_ua option can be used to block requests with an empty User-Agent header.

Iridium can block requests from:

  • known VPNs using the block_vpns option,
  • known public proxies using the block_proxies option,
  • known Tor exit nodes using the block_tor option.

These options use public lists to determine if an IP is a VPN, proxy, or Tor exit node.

You can block specific IPs or ranges using the blocked_ips option. You can specify individual IPs (1.2.3.4) or CIDR ranges (1.2.3.0/24).

To prevent abuse, you can enable rate limiting using the rate_limit option. This option limits the number of requests per IP per second. If an IP exceeds the limit, it will receive a 429 Too Many Requests response.

When a request is blocked by the WAF, by default, Iridium will return a 403 Forbidden response.