Enhance Web Application Security Using AWS WAF

Over the past couple of years, security has become a crucial concern for most companies. Fortunately, there are many services available to help you improve the overall security of your AWS environment. AWS WAF (Web Application Firewall) is a firewall that helps you to protect your web application server against a range of Internet threats.

In this blog, we will discuss AWS Web Application Firewall (WAF) and cover topics

• Overview Of AWS WAF

• Common Web Attacks

• AWS WAF Features

• How It works

• Getting Started With AWS WAF

What is AWS WAF

AWS Web Application Firewall (WAF) is a security tool that helps you to protect the application against web attacks. WAF monitors and controls unusual bot traffic, and blocks common attack patterns, such as SQL Injection or Cross-site scripting, etc. It also lets you monitor the HTTP and HTTPS requests that are forwarded to an Amazon API Gateway API, Amazon CloudFront, or an Application Load Balancer.

• Amazon WAF allows you to control your content by using an IP address from where the request originates.

• Three things make Amazon WAF work – Access control lists (ACL), Rules, and Rule Groups.

• Amazon WAF manages Web ACL capacity units (WCU) for rules, rule groups, and web ACLs.

• Amazon WAF includes a full-featured API that you can use to automate the creation, deployment, and maintenance of security rules.

Common Web Attacks

Before protecting your applications, you need to know the most common web attacks mentioned below.

DDoS(Denial-Of-Service) attacks: This is probably the most common attack. Attackers overload an application by sending bulk requests to the web servers. Thousands of hosts infected with malware are used in this attack, which utilizes more than one unique IP address or machine. This slows down the application and significantly hurt the value of a brand.

SQL injections: SQL injection is a code injection procedure that might destroy your SQL database. Attackers can run malicious SQL queries on your web applications.

Cross-Site Scripting: If your application is vulnerable to cross-site scripting, then the attacker can run or inject malicious scripts, generally in the form of a browser-side script. These scripts can even rewrite the content of the HTML pages.

AWS WAF Features

Amazon Web Application Firewall offers lots of features to its users mentioned below.

• Protection Against Web Attacks: With minimum latency impact on incoming traffic, WAF AWS offers many rules to inspect any element of a web request. WAF AWS protects web applications against threats by filtering traffic according to the rules created.

• Establish Rules Accordingly: WAF AWS is a versatile and valuable tool for protecting the infrastructures of applications. And this is because it allows users to establish rules according to their needs and vulnerabilities that they wish to stop. We can consider it a great solution to protect any web application environment at the enterprise level.

• Web traffic filtering: WAF allows users to create rules to filter web traffic. It filters IP addresses, HTTP headers, HTTP bodies, or URI strings from a web request.

• Flexible Integration With AWS Services: AWS Firewall offers easy integration with other AWS services like Amazon EC2, CloudFront, Load balancer, etc.

• Monitor Rules: Web Application Firewall AWS allows us to create rules and review and customize them to prevent unknown attracts.

Getting Started With AWS WAF WITH SIMPLE UI

1. CREATE VPC

   

2. CREATE INTERNET GATEWAY

   

3. ATTACH TO VPC

   

   4. CREATE SUBNET

      

      

      5. CREATE ROUTE TABLE

         

         

         EDIT ROUTES

         

         

         

         6. LAUNCH EC2 INSTANCE WITH THIS SCRIPT

            

            ACCESS USING IP

            

            7. APPLICATION LOAD BALANCER

               1. TARGET GROUP - need before load balancer

                  

                  

                  

                  

                  create load balancer

                  

                  

                  now access using DNS name

                  

8. create waf

   

IP set - logical ip set put over ip address which we want to block or allow it

successfully created web acl

now i want to block

ui show 403 forbidden means you are blocked

now allow

now captcha

Conclusion

security is a top priority for companies today, and AWS Web Application Firewall (WAF) is a powerful tool that can help protect web applications against a range of Internet threats.

In this blog, we have covered an overview of AWS WAF, common web attacks such as DDoS, SQL injections, and Cross-site scripting, and the features of AWS WAF including protection against web attacks, establishing rules, web traffic filtering, flexible integration with AWS services, and monitoring rules.

We have also provided a step-by-step guide on getting started with AWS WAF, including creating a VPC, internet gateway, subnet, route table, EC2 instance, application load balancer, target group, and web ACL. Finally, we have demonstrated how to block and allow IP addresses using AWS WAF and how to implement a CAPTCHA to prevent bots from accessing the application.

I would like to extend my gratitude to the AI assistant, k21 academy who helped me with this blog post on AWS Web Application Firewall (WAF).

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Happy Learning !!