| Original author(s) | Hugo Leisink |
|---|---|
| Developer(s) | Hugo Leisink |
| Initial release | 2002 |
| Stable release | 7.8.2 / November 18, 2011[1] |
| Written in | C |
| Operating system | Cross-platform |
| Platform | Linux, FreeBSD, Unix-like, Mac OS X, Windows, Haiku os[2] |
| Available in | English |
| Type | Web server |
| License | GNU GPL 2 |
| Website | http://www.hiawatha-webserver.org/ |
Hiawatha is a secure and advanced webserver available for multiple platforms. It has been developed by Hugo Leisink since 2002.
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Hiawatha started in January 2002 as a very small webserver, suitable for servers with old hardware. It was written for internet servers in student houses in Delft of South Holland, the Netherlands. Because the author was a computer science student with special interest in IT security, all sorts of experimental security features were included. This resulted in a webserver with many interesting security features which have proved useful. The author has said "I know for a long time that vulnerabilities [exist in other webservers] . [One thing] that bothers me: the runtime of a CGI. A CGI process [under other webservers] can run forever. A single CGI script can DoS a webserver. A system administrator is needed to kill the script. And what about a client that keeps on guessing passwords for HTTP authentication? These kind of issues inspired me to create Hiawatha, with settings for maximum request sending time, maximum CGI run time, client banning, etc. Features that, in my opinion, every daemon should have."
The January 2009 edition of Linux Magazine contained an article about the Hiawatha webserver.
Hiawatha has many security features that no other webserver has, like preventing SQL-injection, cross-site scripting (XSS), Cross-site request forgery (CSRF) prevention, Denial-of-service protection, control external image linking, banning of potential hackers and limiting the runtime of CGI applications.[3] The author is currently working on RFC3546 support, but "the OpenSSL documentation is just extremely poor" so progress is difficult.
Although security is the main focus, Hiawatha is also doing quite well in terms of speed and performance. According to a performance test carried out by an independent researcher (SaltwaterC), Hiawatha beats others for static content.[4][5] Hiawatha supports load-balanced FastCGI, which makes it fast and scalable for handling dynamic content.