Authors - Polinati Vinod Babu , M.V.P Chandra Sekhara Rao , Kolagotla Venkateswara Reddy , Manukonda Ravi Chandra , C P Pavan Kumar Hota , Kurumalla Suresh Abstract - The web services today are flooded with automated bots, distributed request floods and IP based attacks. Traditional firewalls are based on either a static signature rule or an opaque machine learning model that is not very transparent. We introduce ShieldNet, a lightweight Web Application Firewall (WAF), which is developed in FastAPI and Redis as a state storage. The explainable real-time request filtering performed by ShieldNet is on the basis of a deterministic decision pipeline, a combination of IP reputation scoring (Redis backed, counts on infractions), SlowAPI based rate limiting, Detection of bot user agent, Up-to-date use of open access threat feeds (spamhaus, abuse.ch, etc.). Request identities can be provided as either permitted (HTTP 200), rate limited (429) or blocked (403); all of which can be traced through the middleware layers. Synthetic load testing and feed validation reveal low latency, high throughput and high detection fidelity. The system has good performance, scalability and interpretability balance thus it can be used in real-time web security implementation.
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