{"id":3985,"date":"2015-10-08T02:14:06","date_gmt":"2015-10-07T18:14:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.darknet.org.uk\/?p=3985"},"modified":"2015-11-13T22:50:31","modified_gmt":"2015-11-13T14:50:31","slug":"amazon-aws-web-application-firewall-waf-launched","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.darknet.org.uk\/2015\/10\/amazon-aws-web-application-firewall-waf-launched\/","title":{"rendered":"Amazon AWS Web Application Firewall (WAF ) Launched"},"content":{"rendered":"

So Amazon is stepping up its security game again, this time with an AWS Web Application Firewall or WAF as they are commonly known. Generally a WAF is designed to protect you against common web threats such as XSS (Cross Site Scripting), SQL Injection, and other common patterns (LFI, RFI etc).<\/p>\n

\"Amazon<\/p>\n

We have written about one such tool before: Shadow Daemon \u2013 Web Application Firewall<\/a> and now modern versions of nginx come with an option to use naxsi<\/a> out of the box. Plus the most famous one of all of course, ModSecurity<\/a>.<\/p>\n

As with everything AWS related, it seems rather complex to use, and for every rule you want to add, you have to pay more..so of course – it’s costly.<\/p>\n

AWS WAF, launched on the first day of Amazon\u2019s AWS re:Invent 2015 conference, is designed to give users control over the type of traffic that is allowed or not allowed to reach their web applications. By defining Access Control Lists (ACLs), rules, and actions, users can block SQL injection, cross-site scripting (XSS) and other common attack patterns. Rules can also be created for each user\u2019s specific application.<\/p>\n

The new security product also includes a full-featured API that can be used to automate the creation, deployment and maintenance of rules.<\/p>\n

Jeff Barr, chief evangelist for Amazon Web Services, published a blog post detailing the various AWS WAF concepts, including conditions, rules, web ACLs, and actions.<\/p>\n

Barr explained that conditions are designed for inspecting incoming requests. They can analyze the incoming IP address and various parameters of the request, such as URI, query string, HTTP header, and HTTP method.<\/p>\n

Rules rely on these conditions to block or allow certain types of requests, while actions dictate the action that is taken when a request matches the conditions in a rule. ACLs reference one or more of these rules and the action that is taken for each of them.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n