Obfuscation: The Weak Spot of Rules-Based WAFs — and How AI Beats It
Traditional Web Application Firewalls (WAF) are built on rules and signatures. They block obvious attacks but drown developers and enterprises in false positives, endless tuning, and constant evasion headaches. Every deployment feels like a compromise: noisy alerts, missed threats, or both.
Rule-Based WAF (Before)
Fails when payloads are obfuscated; rules look for literal patterns and crumble under simple transforms.
SELECT/**/name/**/FROM/**/users/**/WHERE/**/id=1/**/OR/**/1=1--<scr<script>ipt>alert(1)</scr<script>ipt>Security teams spend countless hours writing, testing, and tuning rules just to keep up with new attack patterns.
Thousands of fragile rules accumulate (and conflict). More rules → more maintenance → more bugs.
Literal signatures catch benign traffic (forms, search terms) and drown analysts in alerts.
Each request is compared against hundreds of rules/regex patterns, slowing down response time and increasing CPU, memory and infra spend.
New evasion tactics and zero-days require manual rules or vendor updates — leaving windows of exposure
Rule upkeep, tuning time, and infrastructure overhead drive up Total Cost of Ownership — often 2×–3× more than AI-based protection.
KratosWAF (After)
This is not just another WAF. It’s a 100% rule-free, AI-driven approach that makes old models obsolete.
- Beyond OWASP Top 10 - Detects SQLi, XSS, SSRF, Traversal, Command Injection plus advanced evasions and protocol-level tricks.
- 100% Rule-Free by Design - No signatures. No more regex spaghetti or massive rule sets. Just pure AI that learns real attack patterns and classifies traffic automatically.
- Over 99% Detecton Accuracy, Near-Zero False Positives - Focus on building, not babysitting your WAF.
- Strip the Noise, Catch the Threats - Harmless text blobs are ignored, while obfuscated SQLi, XSS, SSRF, and traversal payloads get flagged instantly while rule-based WAFs missed.
- Developer-First Design Approach - Drop it into your stack via API or middleware. No complex configs. No bottlenecks. Just protection that works.
- Smarter Protection. Smaller Bill - KratosWAF delivers 40–60% lower Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) compared to rule-based WAFs — no rule updates, minimal CPU load, and zero tuning overhead.