Zen, in-app firewall for PHP | by Aikido

Zen, your in-app firewall for peace of mind– at runtime.

Zen is an embedded Web Application Firewall that autonomously protects your apps against attacks and provides advanced access controls features.

Zen protects your PHP apps by blocking malicious user input that could lead to security vulnerabilities. It guards against SQL injections, command injections, path traversal attacks, and more. Running directly on your PHP app's server, it offers seamless installation and low maintenance.

Features

Zen will autonomously protect your PHP applications from the inside against:

• 🛡️ SQL injection attacks
• 🛡️ Command injection attacks
• 🛡️ Path traversal attacks
• 🛡️ Server-side request forgery (SSRF)
• 🛡️ Attack wave detection

Zen operates autonomously on the same server as your PHP app to:

• ✅ Secure your app like a classic web application firewall (WAF), but with none of the infrastructure or cost.
• ✅ Rate limit specific API endpoints by IP or by user
• ✅ Allow you to block specific users manually

Install

Zen for PHP comes as a single package that needs to be installed on the system to be protected.

Prerequisites: * Ensure you have sudo privileges on your system. * Check that you have a supported PHP version installed (PHP version >= 7.2 and tested up to 8.5). * Make sure to use the appropriate commands for your system or cloud provider.

Manual install

For Red Hat-based Systems (RHEL, CentOS, Fedora)

x86_64

rpm -Uvh --oldpackage https://github.com/AikidoSec/firewall-php/releases/download/v1.5.12/aikido-php-firewall.x86_64.rpm

arm64 / aarch64

rpm -Uvh --oldpackage https://github.com/AikidoSec/firewall-php/releases/download/v1.5.12/aikido-php-firewall.aarch64.rpm

For Debian-based Systems (Debian, Ubuntu)

x86_64

curl -L -O https://github.com/AikidoSec/firewall-php/releases/download/v1.5.12/aikido-php-firewall.x86_64.deb
dpkg -i -E ./aikido-php-firewall.x86_64.deb

arm64 / aarch64

curl -L -O https://github.com/AikidoSec/firewall-php/releases/download/v1.5.12/aikido-php-firewall.aarch64.deb
dpkg -i -E ./aikido-php-firewall.aarch64.deb

We support Debian >= 11 and Ubuntu >= 20.04. You can run on Debian 10, by doing this setup before install: Debian10 setup

Deployment setup

• Caddy & PHP-FPM
• Apache mod_php
• FrankenPHP classic
• FrankenPHP worker

Managed platforms

• Laravel Forge
• AWS Elastic beanstalk
• Fly.io

Aikido Token setup

• The standard way of setting the Aikido Token is via environment variables -> AIKIDO_TOKEN="your token".
• Another way of doing that, is adding the AIKIDO_TOKEN variable in your .env file.
• If you are unable to set any of the above, there's an alternative way of doing that from PHP, by following the "Token setup from PHP code".

Troubleshooting

Read our troubleshooting documentation.

[!IMPORTANT] If you switch PHP versions after installing Zen, you will need to reinstall the firewall. See Switching PHP versions in the troubleshooting documentation for detailed instructions.

Supported libraries and frameworks

PHP versions

Zen for PHP supports the following PHP versions: 7.2, 7.3, 7.4, 8.0, 8.1, 8.2, 8.3, 8.4, 8.5.

Web frameworks

Zen for PHP is Web-framework agnostic, meaning that it will work on any PHP Web framework that you want to use.

Zen for PHP can do this because the monitored functions are hooked at the PHP-core level.

Database drivers

• ✅ PDO
  • ✅ MySQL
  • ✅ Oracle
  • ✅ PostgreSQL
  • ✅ ODBC and DB2
  • ✅ Firebird
  • ✅ Microsoft SQL Server
  • ✅ SQLite
• ✅ MySQLi
• 🚧 Oracle OCI8
• 🚧 PostgreSQL
• 🚧 SQLite3

Outgoing requests libraries

• ✅ cURL
• Including wrappers, when configured to use cURL as adapter:
  • ✅ GuzzleHttp
  • ✅ HTTP_Request2
  • ✅ Symfony\HTTPClient
• ✅ file_get_contents

Reporting to your Aikido Security dashboard

Aikido is your no nonsense application security platform. One central system that scans your source code & cloud, shows you what vulnerabilities matter, and how to fix them - fast. So you can get back to building.

Zen is a new product by Aikido. Built for developers to level up their security. While Aikido scans, get Zen for always-on protection.

You can use some of Zen’s features without Aikido, of course. Peace of mind is just a few lines of code away.

But you will get the most value by reporting your data to Aikido.

You will need an Aikido account and a token to report events to Aikido. If you don't have an account, you can sign up for free.

Here's how: * Log in to your Aikido account. * Go to Zen. * Go to apps. * Click on Add app. * Choose a name for your app. * Click Generate token. * Copy the token. * Set the token as an environment variable, AIKIDO_TOKEN

Running in production (blocking) mode

By default, Zen will only detect and report attacks to Aikido.

To block requests, set the AIKIDO_BLOCK environment variable to true.

See Reporting to Aikido to learn how to send events to Aikido.

Additional configuration

Configure Zen using environment variables for authentication, mode settings, debugging, and more.

Benchmarks

Zen for PHP benchmarks are splitted into 2 categories: * Benchmarks for single PHP operations (function calls) that are monitored by Zen * Benchmarks for round-trip requests to PHP apps protected by Zen

We do automated benchmarks on each new version and we store the result in the repo. If you need some specific benchmarks for (OS, PHP version) pairs, check the benchmarks folder.

The benchmarking times displayed in this readme are computed with PHP 8.1 on the latest Ubuntu version.

Benchmarks for PHP operations

Benchmarks for PHP requests

Uninstall

Manual uninstall

For Red Hat-based Systems (RHEL, CentOS, Fedora)

rpm -e aikido-php-firewall

For Debian-based Systems (Debian, Ubuntu)

dpkg --purge aikido-php-firewall

Bug bounty program

Our bug bounty program is public and can be found by all registered Intigriti users at: https://app.intigriti.com/researcher/programs/aikido/aikidoruntime

Contributing

See CONTRIBUTING.md for more information.

Code of Conduct

See CODE_OF_CONDUCT.md for more information.

Security

See SECURITY.md for more information.