Phirewall: Protection at the Application Layer

Bots, vulnerability scanners, and automated exploits hit every public PHP application, every day. Infrastructure-level firewalls or a WAF in front of your app could help – but in many projects, that kind of infrastructure simply isn’t available. And even when it is, many attacks slip through because they look like legitimate HTTP traffic.

Phirewall is an open-source application-layer firewall written in PHP. It inspects requests where your application actually lives – catching threats that network firewalls miss, without the overhead of an external WAF.

In this talk, I’ll share why I built Phirewall, how it works under the hood, and how you can integrate it into your own projects. We’ll also look at a ready-made TYPO3 extension built on top of it.