Compare F5 NGINX App Protect vs. open-appsec

A contemporary application security solution that effortlessly integrates within DevOps frameworks, enabling the delivery of secure applications from inception to end-user. The current application environment has evolved significantly, with modern applications consisting of microservices that operate in containers, interact through APIs, and are deployed using automated CI/CD pipelines. It is essential for DevOps teams to incorporate security measures approved by the security team throughout distributed systems without compromising release speed or system performance. NGINX App Protect serves as an effective security solution tailored for modern applications, functioning as both a robust WAF and a defense against application-level DoS attacks, ultimately facilitating the secure delivery of applications from their initial code stage to the final customer. It integrates seamlessly with NGINX Plus and NGINX Ingress Controller, providing strong security controls that safeguard against a wide range of sophisticated threats and evasive attacks. This solution minimizes complexity and reduces tool sprawl while supporting the development of modern applications. By employing NGINX App Protect, organizations can create, secure, and manage adaptive applications that not only lower costs but also enhance operational efficiency and provide improved protection for users against emerging threats. Ultimately, this empowers teams to focus more on innovation and less on security concerns.

open-appsec is an open-source initiative that builds on machine learning to provide pre-emptive web app & API threat protection against OWASP-Top-10 and zero-day attacks. It can be deployed as add-on to Kubernetes Ingress, NGINX, Envoy and API Gateways. The open-appsec engine learns how users normally interact with your web application. It then uses this information to automatically detect requests that fall outside of normal operations, and sends those requests for further analysis to decide whether the request is malicious or not. open-appsec uses two machine learning models: 1. A supervised model that was trained offline based on millions of requests, both malicious and benign. 2. An unsupervised model that is being built in real time in the protected environment. This model uses traffic patterns specific to the environment. open-oppsec simplifies maintenance as there is no threat signature upkeep and exception handling, like common in many WAF solutions.