# RiskMandate — the business case for OWASP Coraza OWASP Coraza (OWASP), by the risk it changes: the register for a stated agent deployment without it and with it, computed from a public model, from the operator to the board. Source: https://riskmandate.ai/business-case-owasp-coraza.html --- # OWASP Coraza, by the risk it changes An OWASP web application firewall that can sit in front of the HTTP traffic an agent sends or receives. Its documentation describes an audit engine that logs complete transactions. Written as an answer, that is a partial record of what the agent did, for the traffic that passes through it, once somebody switches the audit engine on: its default is off. **Open source:** Apache-2.0 · OWASP · [get involved](https://owasp.org/www-project-coraza-web-application-firewall/) **The deployment:** The model's typical deployment, with the answers this project addresses stated as they are without it: what it did cannot be reconstructed. **The model:** the RiskGraph Explorer's 49 facts, 49 risks and 10 roles, copied into this site with its provenance; the register below is computed, not written. [How](business-cases.html#method). ## In its own words, and nothing more. - An audit engine that records complete HTTP transactions. “The SecAuditEngine directive is used to configure the audit engine, which logs complete transactions.” · [coraza.io](https://coraza.io/docs/seclang/directives/), read 24 September 2026 ## Same deployment, different answers. The model asks sixteen questions about an agent deployment. A product’s effect is written as the answers it changes, and each change says what kind of change it is: a statement of what is true, an expectation the agent is asked to meet, a setting, or a boundary enforced by something the agent’s grant does not include. ## 3 retired, 1 new, 22 unchanged. Computed from the model for the deployment above: every risk that holds without it, and every risk that holds with it. A new entry is either one the change brought to light, where an answer replaced a don’t know, or a narrower risk in place of a wider one, where the answer moved from no to partly. Either way the register is more exact, and a register that grows because something was found is working. Retired New ## Who carries less, and who carries the same. Each risk is assigned to the roles it belongs to, and each role reports to another until the board. The count beside each role is the entries it holds without the product and with it. ### Operators ### Owners ### Executives ### The board At the board: the corporate register Corporate risks have no facts of their own. They hold while any risk that leads into them holds, so a single product rarely retires one. What it changes is how many reasons the board is being given. ## Every product is also a new thing in the estate. It sits in the request path, and its audit log stores complete transactions, headers and bodies included, which makes the log itself something to protect. Its documentation states the rule engine's default as _Default: Off_, and describes a _DetectionOnly_ mode that processes rules but never blocks, and in which only the first bytes of a request body are inspected. ## What adopting it takes, before any of this is true. An open-source project costs nothing to download and something to adopt. Every change above depends on the work below, and most of it is customisation to your own deployment. - Run it where the agent's HTTP traffic has to pass, and keep its configuration out of the agent's own reach. - Turn the audit engine on, decide where the log lives, and decide who may read it. - Tune the Core Rule Set to the traffic you actually have, which is where most of the effort goes. ## The limits of the case, stated by the case. - That it blocks anything by default. Its rule engine is off until somebody turns it on. - Anything the Core Rule Set detects. Attack detection does not answer any of the model's sixteen questions, so it is not in this case. - That it was tested. Nothing was installed or run; every change rests on the documentation quoted beside it. - That the register is complete. It is one model, for one stated deployment. A different deployment changes the answers, and so the case. **Next.** Published, and sent to the project's maintainers at the same time. If a change is wrong, or another answer should move, the case changes with the date they said so. ## Make the case in the register’s own terms. If you build a security product for agents, the case for it can be written the same way: what it does in your own words, the answers it changes, and the register before and after. If a case here is wrong about you, tell us and it changes with a date.