However, since a WAF is not designed to ward off all types of attacks, it works best as part of a suite of tools that support a comprehensive application security program. A WAF can provide critical protection for any online business that must securely handle private customer data. Businesses typically deploy a WAF to shield their web applications from sophisticated and targeted attacks, like cross-site scripting XSS and SQL injection , that might result in fraud or data theft.
When successful, these types of incursions can severely compromise customer confidence and even result in regulatory penalties.
A WAF also lightens the administrative burden of ensuring proper web application security testing on a continual basis. From there, teams can receive timely notification of an attack in progress so they can respond much more rapidly to potential security incidents. Combined, all of these advantages can help a company strengthen its web application security and better safeguard customer data from evolving threats.
Via reverse proxy, it monitors, filters, or blocks data packets as they travel to and from a web application. In doing so, it attempts to screen out potentially harmful traffic that may enable web exploits. A WAF may come in the form of a cloud-based solution, an appliance, a server plugin, or a filter. Using pattern recognition, they effectively generated educated guesses on how a web application might react to a specific form of attack using predetermined models of application behavior and attack behavior.
For example, stateless WAFs might check how quickly requests were coming in, whether they were originating from the same source, and other behavioral metrics that might indicate malicious activity was underway. Stateless WAFs could perform such tasks much more rapidly than their human counterparts, but they were not adaptable or nimble enough to successfully ward off evolving attacks. A continual game of cat and mouse ensued in which attackers, upon discovering that their initial form of attack on a web application had been unsuccessful, would simply devise a new form of attack behavior that the WAF had not seen before and could not prevent.
Then, when the WAF eventually received new rules that could ward off this new attack variant, the attackers would come up with yet another method for evading detection. Traditional web application security solutions do not provide visibility and security insights that administrators can use to create an effective application security posture.
Enterprises need real-time visibility into application traffic, user experience, security and threat landscape, and application performance to identify and protect against the most sophisticated attacks. Appliance-based web application firewall WAF solutions do not leverage their privileged position in the path of application traffic and are black boxes when it comes to delivering application visibility. A Web Application Firewall is the first line of defense against sophisticated attacks that would threaten the integrity of your enterprise.
The most effective and efficient solutions offer the following WAF capabilities:. Enterprises must protect themselves from unauthorized transmission of data to external destinations. Consequences of data leakage such as reputational harm, financial penalties or intensive lawsuits can be serious for any organization, regardless of size or industry. Although certain types of data leakage such as intentional data leakage attacks from ill-intentioned employees can be difficult to prevent, WAF can protect against cyber data leakage threats like Malware and Phishing attacks where sensitive data is vulnerable to malicious outsiders.
Even the most advanced web application architectures contain a surprising amount of security flaws. This can make them vulnerable to common attacks such as brute force attacks and even complicated attacks like implementing XML external entities or cross-site request forgery. Fortunately, there are specific approaches to configuring WAF security architecture that will minimize the effectiveness and frequency of the many different attacks. This architecture is useful for early stages of project development.
Although, it is not good for production applications as it introduces a single point of failure. This provides compartmentalization and avoids a single point of failure. In most application architectures, the WAF is best positioned behind the load balancing tier to maximize utilization, performance, reliability and visibility. WAFs are an L7 proxy-based security service and can be deployed anywhere in the data path.
However, we recommend positioning WAFs closest to the application they are protecting behind the load balancing tier to optimize your architecture for utilization, performance, reliability, and visibility. CPU resources are intensive for WAFs because they are dealing with the entire traffic load to evaluate if requests are valid and safe so maximizing utilization from specific WAF placement in the data path is critical.
Deploying a WAF behind the load balancer tier removes the need for an upstream designated WAF load balancing tier, which simplifies the entire data path and increases performance of applications. To increase reliability of WAFs, load balancers can be used to scale them horizontally. WAFs that are positioned in front of the load balancing tier are more susceptible to flash traffic or attacks and calls for another load balancing tier which leads to increased cost and complexity.
A modern hybrid cloud or multi-cloud WAF architecture creates a distributed web application security fabric. The fabric enforces security using built-in analytics to make intelligent security decisions. DDoS stands for distributed denial of service and occurs when multiple compromised systems are used to target a single system causing a Denial of Service DoS attack.
Targets of DDoS attacks consist of both the end targeted system and all systems deleteriously used and controlled by the hacker in the distributed attack. WAF DDoS Protection hinges on the ability of the WAF to correctly recognize the difference between and filtering incoming healthy end user traffic from simulated traffic originating from bots and hijacked browsers.
WAFs are considered better at doing this than older DDoS protection solutions because they analyze HTTP requests and protect more of the application stack working to understand how an application works beyond the communications layer. DDoS WAF protection can then use device fingerprinting to identify safe and potentially harmful users.
An effective WAF testing process requires rigorous testing. Simply testing canned attempts from scanners is not enough. The most accurate WAF test measures effectiveness against logical attacks on the application. This includes knowing how many real attacks were blocked and allowed through.
It also answers not only which valid requests were allowed though, but which were inappropriately blocked. When asking how to test a web application firewall, it is best to use a WAF testing framework that follows these steps:. It also lets the WAF be configured to protect against specific attacks.
Finally, it determines how effective the WAF is against logical attacks. A WAF testing tool must be able test the resilience of web application firewalls against attackers with advanced skills. It needs to generate both legitimate traffic and attack traffic to determine if the WAF can stop attacks without blocking valid requests. A traditional firewall protects the flow of information between servers while WAFs are able to filter traffic for a specific web application.
Network firewalls and web-application firewalls are complementary and can work together. Another distinction from traditional firewalls versus web application firewalls is that traditional security methods include network firewalls, intrusion detection systems IDS and intrusion prevention systems IPS. Depending on the protocol being run, traditional firewalls can operate using a stateless method or a stateful method. Traditional firewalls cannot detect attacks unique to the security flaws in web applications because they do not understand Hypertext Transfer Protocol HTTP which occurs at layer 7 of the OSI model.
They also only allow the port that sends and receives requested web pages from a HTTP server to be open or closed. Next Generation Firewalls concentrate on application stream signatures which work well for outbound internet traffic but offer very little inbound web server protection. Web security gateways defend the clients on your network while browsing the internet, not protecting your network from clients accessing your published web services. Deciding which is best for your enterprise depends entirely on your needs.
Cloud WAFs, provided via SaaS, are managed by your cloud vendor: hardware or software, updates, and security are all maintained by your chosen provider and accessed through a mobile app or web interface.
A high compute capacity makes cloud WAFs more efficient than their hardware counterparts at detection of attacks DDoS , deep security insights with real-time monitoring, and minimization of false positives with advanced analytics. With simple point-and-click configuration, cloud WAFs grow with you, scaling to your capacity needs on a flexible, responsive platform.
Typically, a usage-based payment plan for a web application security firewall is arranged in advance. On-Premises hardware WAFs require far more legwork for security and IT teams, but can provide more fine-tuning customization.
Estimating capacity with hardware WAFs may result in either an excess of or deficient security, depending on fluctuating traffic. Scaling to meet capacity needs will require further WAF hardware adjustments.
Having full access to all of the elements of your platform may be the right plan for your enterprise, allowing you full reign to customize the experience to your unique specifications. With the increased need for customizable application security after the turn of the century there has been an increase in overall web application firewall market size and has led to greater demand of open source web application firewalls.
Open source WAFs give enterprises more flexibility to deploy customized security policies, develop custom security dashboards to monitor and prevent sophisticated attacks and automate routine security tasks that can take IT security teams more time to deploy with on-premise WAFs.
This is achieved through the use of application security source code that has been made available by the active open-source WAF community online or by providers such as ModSecurity. Open-source WAF platforms offer a tools for real-time web application monitoring, access and event logging usually in two common deployment methods; embedded and reverse proxy.
Open-source WAFs features include:. WAF Learning Mode refer to a mode or feature where WAFs are observing activity in an application protected by the firewall and generating a list of repeated patterns of activity in order to generate rules for what is normal vs. This mode is used to determine if the WAF security rules and configurations are too strict or relaxed and enables the WAF to automatically be adjusted.
The primary objective is to prevent false positives from causing problems with the functionality of a site. Suspicious requests are whitelisted in WAF Learning Mode, allowing users to log and see violations, but also allowing the request to go through. If whitelisting is triggered in Learning Mode, users can access the IP address and determine if the action was internal or external. Parameter values are gathered and stored as reference values or generalized into a value set or reference pattern.
Appliance-based web application firewall WAF solutions do not leverage their privileged position in the path of application traffic and are blackboxes when it comes to delivering application visibility. Microsoft offers its Azure Application Gateway WAF as a centrally-managed, layer 7 security solution that integrates into the Azure security center and provides convenient security management without requiring application changes.
The Azure Application Gateway WAF pricing is built into the overall pricing model, which depends on the amount of data processed by gateways and the amount of time when gateways are provisioned and available. Unlike other vendors, users do not pay lump sum fees for WAF application security, but are billed for the number of AWS WAF rules added and web requests received per month. The Barracuda Networks web application firewall comes as a hardware or virtual appliance that can be deployed in an on-prem data center or in the cloud.
Like other top web application firewalls, the Barracuda web application firewall monitors Layer 7 traffic and provides visibility to the application level and Layer 4 traffic. This makes things easy to configure and scale. It is distributed on the Akamai Intelligent Platform.
Kona WAF is deployed at the edge of a network instead of a data center. The Firepower Management Center gives users insights into threats and vulnerabilities from the data center to mobile devices. The Cloudflare web application firewall includes built-in WAF rules that can be applied with one click. This protection is in addition to safeguards from the OWASP top 10 vulnerabilities, which are provided by default.
For example, a Layer 7 DDoS attack sends a flood of traffic to the server layer where web pages are generated and delivered in response to HTTP requests. A WAF mitigates this by acting as a reverse proxy that protects the targeted server from malicious traffic and filters requests to identify the use of DDoS tools.
Network firewalls operate at OSI model Layers 3 and 4, which protect data transfer and network traffic. WAF solutions protect businesses from web-based attacks targeted at applications.
Without an application firewall, hackers could infiltrate the broader network through web application vulnerabilities. WAFs protect businesses from common web attacks such as:. Network firewalls protect against unauthorized access and traffic going in and out of the network. They protect against networkwide attacks against devices and systems that connect to the internet. Examples of frequently used network attacks include:. Standard network firewalls and WAFs protect against different types of threats, so it is vital to choose the right one.
A network firewall alone will not protect businesses from attacks against webpages, which are only preventable through WAF capabilities. So without an application firewall, businesses could leave their broader network open to attack through web application vulnerabilities. However, a WAF cannot protect from attacks at the network layer, so it should supplement a network firewall rather than replace it.
Both web-based and network solutions work at different layers and protect from different types of traffic. So rather than competing, they complement each other. A network firewall typically protects a wider range of traffic types, whereas a WAF deals with a specific threat that the traditional approach cannot cover. The WAF should have a hardware accelerator, monitor traffic and block malicious attempts, be highly available, and be scalable to maintain performance as the business grows.
Purchasing separate firewall products to protect every layer of security is expensive and cumbersome. That is leading businesses to comprehensive solutions like next-generation firewalls NGFWs. They also provide extra context to security policies, which is vital to protect businesses from modern security threats. NGFWs are context-based systems that use information such as identity, the time, and location to confirm that a user is who they say they are.
This added insight enables businesses to make more informed, intelligent decisions about user access. They also include features such as antivirus, anti-malware, intrusion prevention systems, and URL filtering.
This simplifies and improves the effectiveness of security policies in line with the increasingly sophisticated threats that businesses face.
Having one comprehensive view of digital security is often easier and more cost-effective.
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