The OWASP Core Rule Set (CRS) is an Open Source project run by the Open Web Application Security Project (OWASP) and is frequently paired with the Open Source ModSecurity project. As part of Trustwave's commitment to ModSecurity, the Spiderlabs Web Server Security team also frequently contributes to the OWASP CRS project and this week we have some exciting news.
Updates
We are pleased to announce the availability of the OWASP Core Rule Set version 3.0 Release Candidate 2 (RC2). RC2 builds on the on the work in RC1 () that was released in mid-August. It addresses several reported issues and concerns from our users in order to yield a more usable and complete project. The changes include:
- Further reduced false positives
- Template prebuilt exclusions for common web applications (including Wordpress and Drupal)
- A critical fix for usability on Apache 2.2
- Additional documentation updates
- Performance improvements
- Fixes for potential rule bypass issues
For more information about changes in CRS version 3.0.0 RC2 check out our GitHub repository at:
https://github.com/SpiderLabs/owasp-modsecurity-crs
To try CRS release candidate 2, download it from our releases section of our GitHub repository:
https://github.com/SpiderLabs/owasp-modsecurity-crs/releases/tag/v3.0.0-rc2
Note: if you are using CRS v3.0.0-RC1 you will need to update your crs-setup.conf from the RC2 example in order to account for the name change of the former tx.crs_setup_done variable which has become tx.crs_setup_version. For more details see the CHANGE log.
Timeline
We hope that RC2 represents the most stable version of the 3.0.0 branch to date. We plan to leave RC2 open for the remainder of the month and, barring any issues, release 3.0.0 gold on October 31st. Of course, if any issues do arise this timeline may be shifted slightly. After version 3.0.0 becomes stable, we intend to move this branch to become the master branch of the OWASP Core Rule Set repository.
If you have any issues, suggestions, or comments please don't hesitate to open up a issue on our GitHub page. We strive to bring the community the best possible quality projects and in order to ensure that is happening we need as much feedback as possible. Our issues page can be found at https://github.com/SpiderLabs/owasp-modsecurity-crs/issues
Acknowledgments
As always, we'd like to thank the community for their hard work. A special thanks to our core contributors Walter Hop and Christian Folini for their continued dedication to the project. Additionally, we would like to thank the various parties who helped in the review or development of updates: Christian Peron, Christoph Hansen, Jose Nazario, Zach Allen, Kate Flavel, and the countless others who dedicated their time and effort to test RC1 making it a great success.
If you would like to help out with the OWASP CRS project we are always looking for new contributors. You can get involved by reaching out to us via our mailing list, on IRC, or on GitHub. It's a great project to get started with even if you don't like programming or aren't very familiar with security. We look forward to seeing you there!
Thank you!
