ModSecurity 2.6 will likely be the last branch before ModSecurity 3. The 2.6 branch will concentrate on polishing up the current 2.5 feature set, performance, ease of use, supporting arbitrary character sets, and better documentation. I'll be posting 2.6 development releases periodically for users to test and comment on. So that you know what is planned, I am publishing the roadmap for 2.6 below.
- Enhancements
- Enhance persistent storage:
- Allow relative changes to counters to be atomic.
- Optimize storage and retrieval.
- Enhance audit log sanitization:
- Allow partial data sanitization.
- Allow the RESPONSE_BODY to be sanitized.
- Enhance external auditing/alerting (mlogc):
- Optimize data queuing to lower RAM usage.
- Allow sensor metrics to be sent to the console.
- Add connection throttling which can be dictated by the console.
- Allow for more flexibility when writing complex rules:
- Add the ability to determine which targets previously matched.
- Straighten out how non-disruptive actions work with chained rules.
- Performance
- Add a high performance IP address/network matching operator capable of large lists.
- Further tune the detection engine.
- Enhance the detection engine cache with faster lookups.
- Expose more performance metrics through the audit log.
- Ease of Use
- Enhance the build process:
- Allow static linking of dependencies on UNIX like OSes.
- Allow better support for non-gcc compilers.
- Allow for fully automate updates of the Core Rules (and others).
- Arbitrary Character Sets
- Introduce decoding and validating of various character sets.
- Allow for enhancing and expanding decoding in future versions.
- Documentation
- Write more/better examples.
- Enhance ModSecurity internals documentation.
- Better document the different modes of operation.
