WAAP vs. WAF: What’s the Difference?

What is WAF?

Basic WAFs represent one of the most foundational security solutions of the last few decades: the ability to peer into an app’s connections and block requests from malicious devices cannot be overstated.

By sitting at OSI Layer 7, in front of the application, it’s possible for WAF tools to act as a reverse-proxy, where all traffic first passes through them.

This architecture allows security admins to put rules in place that define what traffic should be let through, and what should be blocked. This allows for common web app exploits like SQL injection and cross-site scripting to be identified and blocked before they hit vulnerable users or servers.

Alongside this, WAF tools’ customizability allow for admin teams to craft their own suite of rules that define what traffic their enterprise allows through.

WAAP vs WAF: 3 Key Differences

To illuminate the differences between WAF and WAAP tools, let’s unpack the following aspects of each.

#1. Threat Detection Methods

WAF relies on a set of static rules that are put in place by admin teams and third-party security services. While this is a good start for eradicating blatantly malicious HTTPS traffic (for instance, attackers that attempt to connect to different ports), these static rulesets are not well-positioned to protect against emerging threats.

In other words, stopping variations of an attack is a struggle at the best of times.

Plus, the reliance on encryption has also seen WAFs struggle to examine traffic beyond the confines of who sent it and where it’s going.

WAAP, on the other hand, adds a number of layers that expand the scope of its threat detection.

By monitoring API connections and historic application behavior, threat alerts are able to be generated whenever a potential misuse occurs. This allows zero-day vulnerabilities to be identified before an attacker is able to infiltrate further and progress an attack.

WAAP’s integration with other cutting-edge security tooling has seen it offer Deep Packet Inspection, which allows it to securely decrypt, analyze, and assess traffic in the context of an application.

The final mechanism of WAAP, automated, dynamic response, goes beyond alerts and proactively shuts down suspicious APIs and user actions.

#2. Versatility

WAF solutions’ customizability goes as far as the rulesets they work off.

But, for many modern WAF tools, these rulesets can be immensely large: whether it’s blocking or allowing access after checking an IP address location, or preventing search engine bots from accessing a site, the rule conditions are immensely flexible.

The downside of this approach is the sheer workload this places on the behind-the-scenes cybersecurity team.

If it’s a limited team, they can be stuck having to manually update rules at the expense of analyzing and responding to potential events. This is one reason why WAF as a Service has become popular.

WAAP’s customizability stems from its ingestion of historic application data, coupled with its in-context analysis of traffic. Deployment flexibility extends to it sitting either at the edge of a public-facing network, or within the application’s environment itself.

#3. Performance and Scalability

Because WAF is a reverse-proxy – and the fact that it reads through relevant rulesets in a linear, one-at-a-time fashion – bloated or misconfigured rulesets introduce a lot of latency. This can be especially true in high-traffic environments, as admins often need to implement more rules to secure higher and more complex traffic volumes.

As an enterprise grows over time, then, even a cloud WAF can begin to act as a Single Point of Failure.

Because WAAP is newer, and relies on cloud-native infrastructure, it avoids the performance degradation of legacy WAFs, even in periods of high growth. The behavioral analysis is supported by secure data lakes that make data transfer and analysis quicker and far less expensive than it once was.