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WAF Rule Sets

The WAF Rule Set protects your applications against threats such as SQL Injections, Remote File Inclusion (RFI), Cross-Site Scripting (XSS) and more. WAF analyzes HTTP and HTTPS requests, detects and blocks malicious acts before they reach your infrastructure, without impacting the performance of your applications.

  1. Creating a WAF Rule Set
  2. Monitoring threat detection
  3. Approving the desired whitelist
  4. Enabling threat blocking in the WAF Rule Set

1. Creating a WAF Rule Set for your applications

WAF Rule Set is the set of rules that protects against the most varied types of attacks. It defines the protections you want to activate, the detection sensitivity level and the whitelist.

To create a WAF Rule Set:

  1. Access Real-Time Manager and go to the Edge Libraries > WAF Rules menu;
  2. Click the Add WAF button to add a new Rule Set;
  3. Give your WAF a suggestive name. You will need it to later join the Rule Set through Rules Engine;
  4. Select the Mode you want: Counting or Blocking;
  5. Activate the protections and select one of the five desired sensitivity levels in the Main Settings > Threat Type Configuration tab;
  6. Clich the Save button.

Counting Mode is used to specify that WAF should not block any request. It will analyze your traffic and will count threats. Blocking Mode is used to analyze and block detected threats, protecting your application from malicious users.

We recommend that you activate the rule in Counting Mode at the first moment, to follow the sample of threats detected in the learning stage, before effectively blocking requests. That way you can also adjust the detection sensitivity, according to your application.

During Counting Mode, it is recommended that you leave all protections enabled so that you can monitor the threats detected by WAF.

If false positives are detected, some rules can be added to the whitelist by Azion Support, without the need to disable the full protection for a family of threats. Contact us if you wish to assess the need to include whitelist rules before disabling your protection.

Finally, the Rule Set must be active for WAF to analyze your requests. The Active checkbox allows you to enable and disable WAF quickly for all paths that are associated with the Rule Set.


2. Monitoring threat detection

Leave the WAF Rule Set in Counting Mode for as long as you deem necessary so that most of your application’s functionality is covered.

You should follow the graphics on the WAF tab through Real-Time Metrics > Edge Applications or the WAF logs through Real-Time Events and Data Streaming products.

In Real-Time Metrics, the first graph on the WAF tab (Threats vs Requests) shows three time series:

  • Regular Requests: all HTTP and HTTPS requests analyzed by WAF and are considered secure.
  • Threats: the volume of threats detected by WAF and accounted for, when in Counting mode. These threats are not being blocked at the moment.
  • Threats Blocked: threats effectively blocked by WAF. To start blocking the threats found, the rule set must be in Blocking Mode.

If you also have the Data Streaming service, you can track more detailed information about IP, date and time of access, status code, detected attack family and the configured mode of action.

$time-iso8601 $azion-client-id $azion-virtualhost-id $azion-configuration-id $azion-solution $azion-solution-id $host $conn-request-time $req-method $resp-status $req-uri $waf-threat-family $waf-threat-action $client-geoip-country-name $client-geoip-region-name $client-addr $client-port $req-header(User-Agent) $req-header(Referer) 2017-01-04T17:00:19+00:00 1234a 10203b 1020304050 ha 1441740010 www.yoursite.com 0.129 GET 200 /request-uri?key=value $XSS $LEARNING-BLOCK Brazil Sao Paulo 1.2.3.4 61511 Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; WOW64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/55.0.2883.87 Safari/537.36 https://www.yoursite.com/referrer 2017-01-04T17:00:19+00:00 1234a 10203b 1020304050 ha 1441740010 www.yoursite.com 0.025 POST 200 /request-uri $SQL $LEARNING-BLOCK Brazil Santa Catarina 2.3.4.5 61513 Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; WOW64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/55.0.2883.87 Safari/537.36 https://www.yoursite.com/referrer 2017-01-04T17:00:40+00:00 1234a 10203b 1020304050 ha 1441740010 www.yoursite.com 0.026 GET 301 /request-uri?key=value $RFI $LEARNING-BLOCK Brazil Rio de Janeiro 5.6.7.8 26102 Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; Android 5.1.1; SM-G800H Build/LMY47X) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/55.0.2883.91 Mobile Safari/537.36 https://www.yoursite.com/referrer 2017-01-04T17:00:41+00:00 1234a 10203b 1020304050 ha 1441740010 www.yoursite.com 0.391 POST 200 /request-uri $UWA $LEARNING-BLOCK Brazil Rio Grande do Sul 9.10.11.12 26102 Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; Android 5.1.1; SM-G800H Build/LMY47X) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/55.0.2883.91 Mobile Safari/537.36 https://www.yoursite.com/referrer

Based on this information, you can adjust the sensitivity of the WAF Rule Set, until no more false positives occur. You can also ask Azion to generate a whitelist for your application.


3. Approving the desired whitelist

Ask Azion Support to generate the whitelist proposal, based on the learning stage of your application.

The whitelist proposal generated by Azion will be inserted in the platform and will be available for your approval:

  1. Access the Edge Libraries > WAF Ruless* menu, or access the WAF Rules shortcut on the home screen;
  2. Edit the WAF Rule Set you want to use to evaluate the whitelist;
  3. Enable any rules you wish to approve In the Whitelist tab;
  4. Click on the Save button to save your Rule Set.

4. Activating threat blocking in the rule set

After monitoring the behavior of your application and the threats detected after the learning period and approval of the whitelist, you must change the Rule Set to Blocking:

  1. Access the Edge Libraries > WAF Rules;
  2. Edit the desired WAF Rule Set;
  3. Change the mode from Counting to Blocking.

From that moment on, your application will be protected and the detected threats will be effectively blocked.

Note: WAF only blocks threats if it is configured in Blocking Mode.

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