As a final-year cybersecurity student, I wanted to go beyond tutorials and build something that actually detects real attacks — so I built SentinelShield-WAF, a Flask-based Web Application Firewall.
What it does
SentinelShield inspects incoming HTTP requests and blocks malicious ones in real time using regex-based signature detection across multiple attack categories — SQL injection, XSS, path traversal, command injection, and more.
The numbers
- 47 regex signatures across 7 attack categories
- Tested against 39 real attack payloads
- 100% detection accuracy
- 0 false positives, 0 false negatives
- Deployed live on Railway
What I learned
Getting to 0 FP/FN wasn't easy — early versions either blocked legitimate traffic or missed obfuscated payloads. I had to iterate on the regex patterns and think like an attacker trying to bypass my own rules, not just like a defender writing detection logic.
Try it / check the code
GitHub: https://github.com/SHAROZ221/SentinelShield-WAF
Would love feedback from anyone working on detection engineering or WAF design — what would you add or test differently?
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