hiawatha: blocking SQL injections, XSS and CSRF attacks and exploit attempts

by do son · Published · Updated

Hiawatha

Hiawatha is an open source web server with security, easy to use and lightweight as the three key features. It supports among others (Fast)CGI, IPv6, URL rewriting and reverse proxy and has security features no other web server has, like blocking SQL injections, XSS, CSRF and exploit attempts. Hiawatha runs perfectly on Linux, BSD and MacOS X.

The Hiawatha web server has been written by Hugo Leisink hugo@leisink.net. More information about the Hiawatha web server can be found here.

Feature

  • Secure
    Hiawatha has been written with security in mind. This resulted in a highly secure web server in both code and features. Hiawatha can stop SQL injections, XSS and CSRF attacks and exploit attempts. Via a specially crafted monitoring tool, you can keep track of all your webservers.
  • Easy to use
    You don’t need to be an HTTP or CGI expert to get Hiawatha up and running. Its configuration syntax is easy to learn. The documentation and examples you can find on this website will give you all the information you need to configure your webserver within minutes.
  • Lightweight
    Although Hiawatha has everything a modern web server needs, it’s nevertheless a small and lightweight web server. This makes Hiawatha ideal for older hardware or embedded systems. Special techniques are being used to keep the usage of resources as low as possible.

Installation
If the CMake version installed on your system is lower than 3.0, remove it, download the latest version from https://cmake.org/download/#latest and install it.

tar –xzf cmake-<version>.tar.gz
cd cmake-<version>
./configure
sudo make install

Use the following commands to compile and install Hiawatha. This will install Hiawatha in /usr/local.

git clone https://github.com/hsleisink/hiawatha.git
mkdir build
cd build
cmake .. [options]
sudo make install/strip

The following options for cmake are available. The default value is in uppercase.

-DENABLE_CACHE=ON|off              Enable internal cache support.

-DENABLE_IPV6=ON|off               Enable IPv6 support.

-DENABLE_MONITOR=on|OFF            Enable support for the Hiawatha Monitor.

-DENABLE_RPROXY=ON|off             Enable reverse proxy support.

-DENABLE_TLS=ON|off                Enable TLS (mbed TLS) support.

-DENABLE_TOMAHAWK=on|OFF           Enable Tomahawk, the Hiawatha command shell.

-DENABLE_TOOLKIT=ON|off            Enable the URL Toolkit.

-DENABLE_XSLT=ON|off               Enable XSLT support.

-DUSE_SYSTEM_MBEDTLS=on|OFF        Compile Hiawatha against the system's mbed TLS library (>=2.0.0).

 

The following path settings are available for cmake.

-DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=<path>      The prefix for all other CMAKE_INSTALL directories.

-DCMAKE_INSTALL_BINDIR=<path>      Location of the ssi-cgi binary.

-DCMAKE_INSTALL_SBINDIR=<path>     Location of the other Hiawatha binaries.

-DCMAKE_INSTALL_SYSCONFDIR=<path>  The configuration files will be installed in <path>/hiawatha.

-DCMAKE_INSTALL_LIBDIR=<p9ath>      The mbed TLS shared library will be installed in <path>/hiawatha.

-DCMAKE_INSTALL_MANDIR=<path>      Manual pages will be installed in <path>/man1.

-DCONFIG_DIR=<path>                Location of the Hiawatha configuration files.

-DLOG_DIR=<path>                   Log directory used in the default hiawatha.conf.

-DPID_DIR=<path>                   Location of the Hiawatha PID file.

-DWEBROOT_DIR=<path>               Webroot directory used in the default hiawatha.conf.

-DWORK_DIR=<path>                  Path of directory where Hiawatha can write temporary files.

 

Copyright © by Hugo Leisink

Source: https://github.com/hsleisink

Tags: Hiawatha