Install Vulture WAF Cluster in VMWare Workstation

Vulture allows you to filter incoming and outgoing web trafic and block threats like injection, cross site scriping... and other attacks of the OWASP Top10.
It is relying on mod_security, mod_defender (fork of Naxsi), and mod_svm (Machine learning based on Support Vector Machines) to filter HTTP traffic.

mod_security has been improved to fit Vulture's clustered design. mod_svm is the exclusive property of aDvens, and freely usable in Vulture. mod_defender is freely available under a GPLv3 licence : https://github.com/VultureProject/mod_defender

All these filtering engines works together, and you don't have the complexity of managing 3 different engines: All is simplified in the Vulture GUI. Another cool benefit of having mod_security and mod_defender is that you can create ruleset that mix MAXSI's syntax and mod_security's syntax, depending of what you want to achieve.

If a "abnormal request" is detected, mod_security or mod_svm or mod_defender will increment the score of the request. If the request score reach the maximum accepted score, Vulture will block.

Vulture WAF Modules and Engines

Web Application Firewall modules:
1. Clustered mod_security, using hiredis [blacklisting]
2. mod_defender, aka "Naxsi for Apache2" [whitelisting]
3. mod_svm [machine learning]


Filtering Engine:

Client  <--> FreeBSD pf  <-->  Apache httpd  <----> following filters :
1. IP Reputation (Immediate Block)
2. Geo IP (Immediate Block)
3. mod_vulture (Authentication & SSO)
4. mod_defender (Request scoring ++)
5. mod_security (Request scoring ++)
6. mod_svm (Request scoring ++)

Architecture

Installation Steps

1. Downloading: https://download.vultureproject.org/v4/12.1/isos/vulture4-12.1-amd64.ova

2. Double click downloaded ova file to import into VMWare workstation

For Cluster Primary node vul1: 

3. Start VM 

4. Log in Vulture with username/password: vlt-adm/vlt-adm 

5. type 'admin' to start configuration tool, 

6. set up network config (static ip 192.168.74.10), change hostname vul1,  

7. exit from 'admin'. 

8. execute "sudo /home/vlt-adm/gui/cluster_create.sh" and create an account for Web GUI interface. For example: admin / P@ssword1234! 

9. Open Web browser https://192.168.74.10:8000/ 

10. Log in with created Web GUI account, such as admin / P@ssword1234! 

For Cluster Secondary node vul2:

11. Same process for second node to log in, admin->change to static ip 192.168.74.11, change hostname to vul2
12. restart vul2 via admin->root shell-> 'reboot' or "shutdown -r now"

Web GUI Overview

Home:

YouTube

References:

• Preview of Vulture’s upcoming web filtering engine