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Shibuya – A High-Performance WAF in Rust with eBPF and ML Engine

Shibuya – A High-Performance WAF in Rust with eBPF and ML Engine

by germainluperto·Feb 23, 2026·22 points·18 comments

AI Analysis

●●●BangerWizardryBig BrainBold Bet

eBPF kernel drops + dual ML engine beats Cloudflare in latency, single microsecond blocks.

Strengths
  • Genuine technical depth: dual ML pipeline (IsolationForest for anomaly, Random Forest for attack classification) with SHAP explainability—not just rule matching.
  • Kernel-level eBPF/XDP filtering at ~1µs latency eliminates userspace overhead entirely; credible claim against cloud-hosted WAFs.
  • WASM plugin extensibility with sandboxing allows custom security logic without forking; hot-reload in production is rare and valuable.
Weaknesses
  • Linux-only (no Windows/macOS), severely limiting addressable market for enterprises with heterogeneous infra.
  • Metrics dashboard (4297 SQLi blocked, etc.) appear to be from a demo/test environment; real-world production telemetry missing to validate claims at scale.
Category
Target Audience

DevSecOps engineers, infrastructure teams, enterprise security ops evaluating WAF alternatives

Similar To

ModSecurity · Cloudflare WAF · AWS WAF

Post Description

Hi HN,

I’ve been working on Shibuya, a next-generation Web Application Firewall (WAF) built from the ground up in Rust.

I wanted to build a WAF that didn't just rely on legacy regex signatures but could understand intent and perform at line-rate using modern kernel features.

What makes Shibuya different:

Multi-Layer Pipeline: It integrates a high-performance proxy (built on Pingora) with rate limiting, bot detection, and threat intelligence.

eBPF Kernel Filtering: For volumetric attacks, Shibuya can drop malicious packets at the kernel level using XDP before they consume userspace resources.

Dual ML Engine: It uses an ONNX-based engine for anomaly detection and a Random Forest classifier to identify specific attack classes like SQLi, XSS, and RCE.

API & GraphQL Protection: Includes deep inspection for GraphQL (depth and complexity analysis) and OpenAPI schema validation.

WASM Extensibility: You can write and hot-load custom security logic using WebAssembly plugins.

Ashigaru Lab: The project includes a deliberately vulnerable lab environment with 6 different services and a "Red Team Bot" to test the WAF against 100+ simulated payloads.

The Dashboard: The dashboard is built with SvelteKit and offers real-time monitoring (ECharts), a "Panic Mode" for instant hardening, and a visual editor for the YAML configuration.

I'm looking for feedback on the architecture and the performance of the Rust-eBPF integration.

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