How to Overcome the Biggest Web Application Firewall (WAF) Challenges
WAFs are a critical component within modern web application security. By sitting between an application’s cloud-based or on-prem workloads and the public internet, a WAF can analyze all incoming HTTP/s traffic according to a set of predefined policies.
While WAFs are essential to web application protection, they can represent a major time investment, since their underlying rules demand continuous refinement as an app is patched over time. The security alerts being generated also directly influence a SOC’s day-to-day operations, making high-quality alerts essential to WAF success. However, mismanaged tooling can introduce a host of web application firewall challenges.
Web Application Firewall Challenge #1: Alert Fatigue
Alerts are a key feature of WAFs: they’re how an organization’s security team can be directed towards a policy violation, and therefore take the appropriate actions to prevent or block an underlying threat. A WAF’s key advantage is in identifying which device or service created these policy violations. Unfortunately, alerts have also become one of the greatest application security hurdles.
Alerts are only as good as the underlying security team; too many alerts – or alerts over benign network activity – can begin to drastically reduce a team’s real-world attack readiness. This mismatch is named alert fatigue, and is one of the key challenges of today’s WAF. At its core, alert fatigue stems from an overwhelming number of irrelevant false positives in WAF.
One major contributor to alert fatigue is the tendency for WAFs to generate alerts for benign activities, such as traffic from legitimate bots like search engine crawlers or monitoring tools. Similarly, WAFs can flag traffic that matches application vulnerabilities – even those that have already been patched. While technically accurate, these alerts are often redundant and only become noise.
Because of this constant stream of low-priority alerts, many organizations choose to operate their WAFs in detection-only mode. While this avoids the risk of accidentally blocking legitimate users, it essentially handicaps an organization’s rapid defenses, increasing WAF limitations.
How to Reduce Alert Fatigue
To effectively manage this challenge, it’s crucial to understand the origins of low-value alerts and filter them appropriately. For WAFs, this requires a strategic blend of automation, intelligent filtering, and operational discipline.
One option is to load a WAF with dynamic thresholding. These automatically adjust a WAF’s actions, according to network behavior patterns: for instance, should an application see a surge in bot activity, it could then implement CAPTCHA challenges to restrict access. Security alerts can then take this bot status into account. Dynamic thresholds can drastically increase WAF effectiveness by adjusting policy actions automatically.
Alert fatigue can also be a deeper, operational issue: if alerts aren’t going to the right teams – or are manually being distributed – they can start to build up. Role-based alert routing ensures that alerts are directed to the appropriate teams, reducing unnecessary notifications and improving response times. Establishing clear escalation procedures also keeps critical alerts streamlined, and therefore efficiently managed.
In most cases, however, alert over-creation stems from a sub-standard rule set. A WAF that can include more angles of data can begin to incorporate contextual analysis into its rules.
Web Application Firewall Challenge #2: Rule Management
Most WAFs operate off predefined rule sets: rules each have an action that triggers them, and a corresponding action they take in return. However, keeping WAF rules up to date and fine-tuned to the specific application environment is deeply labor-intensive. Frequent application changes are common – particularly in Agile/DevOps environments – and threat actors are always making use of evolving cyber threats to develop new attack methods. The result is that WAFs require constant rule updates to tread the line between false positive reduction and avoiding missed attacks.
Making this more difficult is rule management complexity: legacy WAFs rely on massive libraries of regex patterns, leading to brittle and convoluted rule sets that are difficult to manage and even harder to adjust without specialized expertise. These large rulesets can also begin to introduce latency, in turn cutting an application’s user base. Even though some WAFs have tried to make this easier by packaging different rules into more abstract packages, customization and testing these rules can remain a significant challenge.
How to Manage Rules Efficiently
Depending on your WAF, and whether it’s delivered by a third-party provider, it’s possible to essentially outsource a great deal of day-to-day rule management by using managed rule sets from your WAF provider. These are regularly updated to address the latest threats and vulnerabilities, therefore reducing the manual workload on a lean team.
Efficient rule implementation is also key to avoiding WAF performance issues: place broad, high-impact rules at the top of your ruleset to filter out the most unwanted traffic early. Narrow or specialized rules should be positioned lower to minimize unnecessary processing – and therefore latency. From a rule management perspective, rule labels and clear naming conventions can dramatically accelerate monitoring and troubleshooting, especially in complex environments.
Stop Relying on WAF Alerts with Check Point CloudGuard
Having a WAF that intelligently analyzes, cross-references, and verifies alerts can eliminate the normal challenges with the solution. Check out how WAF security has developed into CloudGuard with our webinar. Check Point’s CloudGuard WAF delivers full attack recognition and prevention without the endless rule changes, thanks to AI-powered threat detection that rapidly learns an application’s network behaviors. This also grants zero day defenses, helping keep applications secure even throughout heavy development periods.
Alongside it, CloudGuard automatically discovers and analyzes an app’s APIs, preventing API abuse and enforcing correct API schema from deployment. It’s deployable in just minutes, thanks to a WAF-as-a-service model that needs a single, one-time DNS configuration to get up and running. Its success lies in the fact that the vast majority of CloudGuard customers run their WAF tools solely in prevention mode.
Start supercharging your WAF capabilities with CloudGuard, and gain an in-depth view of the tool with a demo.
