High-Traffic Website Protection: How Leading Platforms Secure Their Traffic

What Does Top-Level Traffic Really Mean?

Imagine a video platform that ranks among the top 100 globally, with monthly traffic in the billions and over 150 million active users. How many requests does such a platform receive daily? And how many web attacks are hidden within that traffic?

For a top video site like this, daily peak traffic can reach nearly 60 billion requests, with up to 800,000 to 1 million web attacks per day. While ensuring robust web security, the platform must also safeguard user data and maintain a seamless user experience. The challenge of security is evident.

Traditional Web Application Firewalls (WAFs) often struggle to meet the security needs of high-traffic websites. They may not be well-suited to handle the "new versus old" challenges in terms of performance, leading to significant impacts. For example:

1. Site Latency: There's a well-known inverse relationship between site latency and conversion rates. On high-traffic websites, any delay caused by security devices directly affects customer retention, leading to revenue loss.

2. False Positives and False Negatives: High traffic means greater sensitivity to errors. A single false positive could prevent a large number of customers from using the site's features, amplifying the damage.

3. Business Interruptions: Traditional security products often lack the ability to scale horizontally. The massive traffic can overwhelm security servers, and any downtime will directly lead to business interruptions, affecting user experience.

Why Do “Top-Tier” Platforms Choose SafeLine?

As one of the first products to commercialize semantic analysis technology, SafeLine offers efficient and accurate attack detection with client access latency below 5ms, a false positive rate under 0.87%, and a false negative rate under 0.73%. With its innovative software-based clustered deployment model, SafeLine has over 500 detection nodes deployed across private and public clouds globally, handling peak requests of over 200,000 QPS per node.

SafeLine is a high-performance WAF that is highly compatible with large-scale website architectures. It ensures business continuity while providing seamless protection and enhancing user experience. SafeLine's features include high stability, support for high concurrency, high availability, scalability, and ease of use.
Since its launch in 2016, SafeLine has served hundreds of clients, processing billions of daily requests and blocking millions of attacks, providing 24/7 protection for their websites, transaction systems, management platforms, and more.

Case 1: A Top 100 Global Video Site

This video site has over 5 billion monthly traffic, 150 million active users, and over 100 million daily video views. Daily peak request volume is nearly 60 billion, with 700,000 concurrent requests on average and up to 900,000 at peak.

• Security Needs:

  1. Web security protection without impacting business, with daily peak web attacks of up to 800,000.
  2. Fast iteration of architecture and business systems with diverse business requirements.
  3. Complex network architecture with virtualized deployment environments.
  4. Cloud and clustered deployment of security products, with scalable detection nodes to meet high traffic demands.

• Deployment:
  Clustered embedded deployment, handling 200,000 QPS at peak, with only 35% CPU usage.

• Protection Results:
  1. Seamless integration with the client’s system without major adjustments to the load balancing cluster configuration.
  2. Flexible WAF deployment, enabling horizontal scaling based on business needs.
  3. 24/7 stable protection, with average detection time around 2ms, and no business interruptions.

Case 2: A Global Mobile Phone Manufacturer

This large manufacturer operates multiple public-facing systems and HTTP interfaces, including its official website, app store, forums, search, and user center, serving users worldwide. With millions of QPS, peak daily request volume reaches tens of billions and is rapidly growing.

• Security Needs:

  1. Seamless integration of business sites into the WAF without altering network topology.
  2. Fast and elastic expansion of WAF based on traffic growth.
  3. Lower false positive and false negative rates.
  4. WAF processing latency under 2ms during high concurrency, improving user experience.
  5. Adequate 0-day defense capabilities.

• Deployment:
  Clustered embedded deployment, handling over 100,000 QPS at peak, with 50% CPU usage.

• Protection Results:
  • Embedded cluster deployment without changing the original network topology, with zero impact on business.
  • Elastic WAF node expansion, supporting unlimited concurrent processing.
  • Blocking hundreds of thousands of attacks daily, with peak blocking numbers in the millions.
  • Single-node processing capability of 150,000 QPS, with average processing time around 1ms.
  • Excellent 0-day defense capabilities to handle unknown threats.

The Source of SafeLine’s High Performance

SafeLine, Chaitin Technology's high-performance next-generation WAF, combines an "intelligent brain" with "flexible deployment options." Utilizing intelligent semantic analysis technology and a clustered deployment model, SafeLine offers high accuracy, low false positive rates, fast detection speeds, strong stability, and scalability. It is highly adaptable to the security needs of high-traffic websites, helping them improve both web protection quality and operational efficiency.

1. Fast Detection, No Latency:
   SafeLine's intelligent semantic analysis engine has a low complexity algorithm, minimizing resource consumption. The engine’s multiple algorithms can identify various attack types without needing to compare each attack characteristic individually, keeping detection speed within 5ms and avoiding losses due to site latency.

2. Accurate Interception, Low False Positives:
   SafeLine’s engine can detect attacks based on contextual logic, far surpassing traditional regex engines that only understand text. This improves detection of unknown threats, pushing attack interception performance to top-tier global levels.

3. Seamless Protection, No Business Interruptions:
   SafeLine supports reverse proxy clustering and embedded clustering deployment modes. Both modes offer excellent horizontal scalability, theoretically supporting unlimited concurrent processing. This addresses the deployment needs of high-traffic websites and offers support for active-active and master-slave configurations, ensuring strong stability.

Furthermore, SafeLine’s embedded cluster mode deploys the interception cluster within the existing application load cluster, perfectly integrating with the client’s system. This allows traffic detection without altering the existing network topology, effectively preventing business interruptions caused by insufficient horizontal scalability and ensuring business continuity.

As a next-generation network security technology that changes the world, Chaitin Technology’s SafeLine has been recognized by Gartner’s “Magic Quadrant for Web Application Firewalls” report for two consecutive years, included in the Gartner 2018 “Magic Quadrant for Web Application Firewalls Asia-Pacific Edition” report, and listed by IDC as a leading vendor in China’s web application security market. This recognition underscores SafeLine’s industry leadership.

Website: https://waf.chaitin.com
GitHub: https://github.com/chaitin/SafeLine
Discord: https://discord.gg/3aRJ4qfwjA