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WAF In AWS

In this article, we will discuss WAF in AWS.

What Is WAF?

WAF (Web Application Firewall) prevents your web application and API from malicious attacks. WAF gives control to the traffic that reaches your application.

You can create security rules to control the traffic. AWS provides a set of predefined rules that gets updated as a new issue emerges. You can create your own custom rules as well.

Pricing Aspects

Pricing depends on: -

How many rules you have deployed?
How many requests are received by your application?

How To Create A WAF?

To create a WAF, search the word waf in the search box. Click on the WAF & Shield service in the search result.

Picture showing the WAF & Shield service in the search result

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A window will appear to create the rule. Click on the Create web ACL button.

Picture showing the Create web ACL for creating the WAF

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A screen will appear to enter the ACL details. Click on the Next button to continue.

Picture showing the screen to enter the ACL details

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In the next screen, create the rule. You can either select the predefined rule or the custom rule. For this article, I am selecting the Add managed rule groups option.

Picture showing the screen for adding the rules and rule groups

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On the next screen, you can select any rule. For this article, I am selecting Core rule set. For that, toggle the rule and click on the Edit button.

Picture showing the screen for adding the Core rule set

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In the edit screen, I am selecting the rule NoUserAgent_HEADER rule. It means, block all the requests that do not have HTTP user-Agent header.

Picture showing selecting the NoUserAgent_HEADER rule

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Click on the Save rule button. The rule is saved.

Picture showing the NoUserAgent_HEADER rule added

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Click on the Add rules button.

Picture showing the rule added in rules and rule groups screen

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In the next screen, you can select the default action. For this article, I am blocking all the traffic that does not have HTTP user-Agent header.

Picture showing the screen for setting up the rule priorities

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Click on the Next button. In the next screen, you can set the rule priority. As we have only one rule, we can click on the Next button.

Picture showing the screen for configuring metrics

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In the next step, we can configure the metrics. Click on the Next button.

Picture showing the review screen for creating ACL

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Finally, the review screen will come. Click on the Create web ACL button.

How To Apply The ACL Rule?

Let us say that we are creating a CloudFront distribution. At the time of creation, you can select the WAF web ACL.

Picture showing where the ACL is applied on cloudfront

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Posted By -	Karan Gupta

Posted On -	Friday, December 17, 2021

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