Web Application Firewalls

Web Application Firewall (WAF) Overview

What are Web Application Firewalls (WAFs)?

Web Application Firewalls (WAFs) hel protect externally-facing web applications. WAFs are part of a layered cybersecurity strategy. It falls to the WAF to prevent zero-day attacks on web apps and APIs that potentially reside in serverless architecture.

In 2006 the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) mandated the protection of applications in production environments with web application firewalls or other devices that provide similar functionality.

Web Application Firewall (WAF) Features & Capabilities

WAFs protect web applications against threats such as:

Cross-site scripting
SQL injection
Session hijacking
Denial of service
Buffer overflows

WAFs generally present the following features:

Libraries of attack data based on known attacks to web applications
Monitoring, filtering and blocking of data and access to web applications
Automated attack detection, both identity-based (e.g. dynamic whitelisting, fingerprinting, risk scoring) and behavioral (e.g. risk scoring)
Advanced security techniques (e.g. deception/misdirection, virtual patch deployment, honeypot)
Zero-day attack prevention (related to the above)
A management interface with alert system
Reporting and analytics on threat and application usage

Pricing Information

The cost of web application firewalls depends on deployment. There are three options:

A managed service or cloud-hosted WAF delivered as part of a subscription. This can be relatively low overhead as part of a larger subscription (e.g. part of a CDN). But it also may contain unneeded features.
A network-based appliance. This presents relatively high overhead but reduces latency because it is installed locally and close to the application.
A host-based WAF residing in the application’s code. This is rarer and may present less desirable computing costs and greater maintenance.

47 Ratings

CloudFlare, from the company of the same name in San Francisco, provides DDoS security to business domains, as well as a content delivery network (CDN) and web application firewall (WAF).

20 Ratings

F5 BIG-IP from Seattle-based F5 Networks is a SSL VPN solution and suite of products supporting a wide range of security and application performance needs. The suite includes BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) traffic management and optimization, BIG-IP DNS, BIG-IP Access Policy Manager (APM) ide...

5 Ratings

Oracle Dyn Web Application Security Platform extends beyond just typical Web Application Firewall (WAF) capabilities to offer Access Control, Bot Management, application DDoS protection and API security.

6 Ratings

SecureSphere from Imperva in California is an enterprise application and file security suite, combining database and file security management and monitoring under its database and file security products with the SecureSphere Web Application Firewall, and provides total visibility through its mana...

8 Ratings

Barracuda Web Application Firewall, from Barracuda Networks in Campbell, California, protects web applications from bots, DDoS attacks, and other advanced threats to enterprise apps.

3 Ratings

Incapsula, a Content Delivery Network (CDN) serivce was acquired by Imperva in 2014, and supplies users with DDoS protection and web application firewall (WAF).

3 Ratings

Amazon Web Services offers AWS WAF (web application firewall) to protect web applications from malicious behavior that might impede the applications functioning and performance, with customizable rules to prevent known harmful behaviors and an API for creating and deploying web security rules.