A WAF serves to protect web applications against cyberattacks by inspecting and blocking egress traffic that contains unwelcome content, acting as both an inspector and transparent reverse proxy.
Selecting an effective WAF tool requires having a clear idea of your objectives and choosing a solution that provides flexible deployment, customer support and real-time attack detection capabilities.
Security
Web application firewalls filter network edge traffic to intercept malicious requests before they reach users and web applications, protecting users against known vulnerabilities and threats while mitigating risk by eliminating many forms of zero-day attacks that attackers use against apps and servers.
WAFs offer applications a level 7 (application level) protection by blocking attacks such as cross-site scripting, DDoS attacks and SQL injection. Furthermore, WAFs help prevent unauthorized transfers from application infrastructures by inspecting and blocking outgoing traffic which contains any unknown values.
WAFs can either be rules-based or adaptive. Rules-based WAFs rely on predefined security rules provided by vendors or configured by administrators to defend against OWASP Top 10 vulnerabilities and other common attack vectors, while adaptive engines combine other application security capabilities such as IPS, rate-limiting, authentication and SSO to offer more robust protections against attackers.
Scalability
The most effective WAFs provide high levels of flexibility and scalability, accommodating for various attack vectors and traffic types while being configured to detect sophisticated attacks that bypass generic firewalls by taking into account context and other relevant factors.
WAFs utilize a correlation engine that analyzes all incoming data packets to detect any malicious ones, using known attack signatures, AI/ML analysis, application profiling and custom rules as tools to detect threats and block them. Whitelisting can also be enabled for specific amounts of safe traffic.
Progress LoadMaster WAF offers organizations three primary deployment options based on their unique needs: network, host and cloud WAFs. Progress LoadMaster is one such network solution which can be installed either as dedicated hardware or virtual appliance software – ideal for network security infrastructure tools such as SIEMs and log management solutions – plus it enables organizations to set and copy rules across devices to quickly deploy new applications with minimal downtime.
Performance
Cloud WAFs offer an ideal way to secure web applications without the added strain of managing servers yourself. These filters filter inbound and outbound traffic to ensure only valid requests reach it; helping prevent hacker attacks while increasing website performance by decreasing latency.
The Barracuda Web Application Firewall is a system that monitors all traffic entering and leaving a web server, offering data loss prevention. It can be deployed as either a SaaS system, appliance or virtual network device.
AppTrana managed Web application firewall from Indusface is a fully managed service bundled with content acceleration and CDN across the cloud, complete with optimized core managed rules set derived from security assessments of thousands of websites. Custom rules may also be added and you’ll get 24×7 support, along with zero WAF false-positive assurance and zero WAF false-positives assurances. Furthermore, AppTrana can detect and mitigate DDoS attacks while its REST API facilitates easy integration into DevOps tools CI/CD automation automation tools via DevOps tools enabling full automation across CI/CD operations tools via DevOps tools via DevOps tools to facilitate automation via DevOps tools to ensure complete integration into DevOps toolchain.
Management
Protect your business against common cyberattacks with an all-encompassing WAF solution that combines IDS/IPS, SSL/TLS encryption and authentication – essential when access control, configuration issues and broken cryptography dominate the most recent OWASP Top 10. To increase network infrastructure security.
A WAF monitors web application data and network traffic to detect known patterns of attack or activity which might signal new techniques. Based on its configured rule-sets or policies, it then blocks or allows network requests or responses as appropriate.
Network-based WAFs can be deployed as either physical appliances or, increasingly, virtual machine instances on networking infrastructure and collocated with field applications. The latter offers lower latency rates while eliminating upfront and ongoing investment in separate hardware appliances – while still offering all of the security capabilities of full-featured WAFs.
Implementing a WAF in the cloud offers many advantages, including centralized management and scalability. A fully-integrated Progress WAF features an intuitive dashboard that organizes massive amounts of data easily for easy reading; key insights include system performance, traffic patterns, subscription statuses and subscription management status. Plus it easily integrates with external SIEM tools for monitoring/logging purposes!