As organizations adopt more cloud-based technologies, they expand their attack surface. Every new connection, whether human, machine, or code, creates a potential attack vector that malicious actors can use to compromise systems, networks, devices, and data. One of the most difficult attack vectors to secure is the application programming interfaces (APIs) that allow their Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) applications to share information, often sensitive data that attackers seek to steal.
Easy to create but difficult to manage, APIs have become security nightmares. Attacks are common and varied, with research noting:
- 33% of organizations experienced multiple API-related attacks in the last 12 months
- 31% of organizations experienced an API-related security attack in the last 12 months
To mitigate risk, organizations need to implement defense-in-depth strategies that respond to the unique risks APIs pose. By understanding how web application firewalls (WAF) and Web Application and API Protection (WAAP) complement each other, organizations can implement a robust security strategy.
What is WAAP?
WAAP is a cloud-based security service that mitigates risk against a wide range of cyber threats. By operating from the outer edge of a network, WAAP analyzes incoming traffic to shield sensitive data within web applications and APIs from malicious content. A WAAP security solution typically includes advanced features like:
- API protection
- Advanced bot management
- Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack mitigation
These capabilities help mitigate security risks like:
- Vulnerability exploits
- Automated attacks
- Fraudulent activities
- Insecure third-party API integrations
Learn more about Vercara’s WAAP solutions.
What is WAF?
A Web Application Firewall (WAF) shields web-facing applications from malicious traffic by analyzing HTTP and HTTPS traffic. They focus on identifying and nullifying various web application attacks like:
- SQL injection
- Cross-site scripting
- File inclusion
WAFs can be deployed as:
- Hardware appliances
- Virtual appliances
- Cloud-based services
Advanced WAFs offer a combination of two security models to minimize false positives and enforce security policies:
- Positive security models: allow lists supported by machine learning
- Negative security models: block lists of identified malicious signatures
Learn more about Vercara’s Web Application Firewall solution.
Why A WAF is not enough
WAFs focus on protecting web application traffic against certain threats, but they lack capabilities for real-time identification of unknown threats.
Reliance on signatures
They primarily depend on signature-based security policies that rely on predefined attack patterns, making them less effective against new or evolving attacks. Relying on previously used attack patterns means they often fail to identify advanced bots that mimic human behavior. Highly distributed bot networks follow different behavioral patterns, making it difficult for a WAF to distinguish bot traffic from legitimate traffic. Ultimately, this leaves organizations at risk of DDoS attacks since botnets that cycle through thousands of IP addresses can bypass these IP-based policies.
Manual, custom rules
WAFs lack real-time learning capabilities. Often, security teams manually create custom rules in response to a bot attack rather than having a proactive risk mitigation strategy. When WAFs do receive an update, security teams either spend time identifying and deleting redundant rules or end up with rule bloat that can create latency issues.
Inability to identify API vulnerabilities
Since WAFs focus on scanning traffic for abnormal behavior, they do not look at the APIs themselves. They are unable to identify API vulnerabilities, like server-side forgery requests where the API fails to properly validate user-supplied URLs when fetching a remote source. The WAF only looks at the traffic patterns with no insight into whether the API’s code creates a security risk.
WAAP vs WAF: similarities and differences
While a WAF protects against specific web application attacks, a WAAP is a more extensive security solution covering additional advanced threats, including API attacks and mitigating malicious bot activity.
What are the similarities between WAAP and WAF?
Web Application Firewalls (WAF) and Web Application and API Protection (WAAP) share several core similarities.
Protect at Layer 7
They both help protect Layer 7, enabling organizations to mitigate threats like:
- Slowloris attacks
- Brute force attacks
- DDoS attacks
Adaptable to modern execution environments
Both technologies can protect diverse infrastructures, including cloud-native dynamic clusters and serverless functions. While they both evolved with different functionalities, their fundamental goal remains to safeguard application traffic from sophisticated threats.
What are the differences between WAF and WAAP?
As API threats evolved, so did the technologies used to mitigate risk. By understanding their differences, organizations can identify security gaps and create a layered mitigation strategy. Where a WAF monitors and filters traffic to block malicious and unauthorized activity, WAAP solutions build on their WAF implementations with additional bot mitigation and DDoS protections.
Network Traffic vs. Application Traffic
WAF focuses on Layer 7 of the OSI model, the application layer. It protects applications by filtering and blocking traffic.
WAAP protects at:
- Layer 7 (Application Layer): identifying bot traffic
- Layer 4 (Transport Layer): Identifying bot traffic, enforcing access control lists (ACLs), and mitigating DDoS attacks
- Layer 3 (Network Layer): mitigating DDoS risks
Unauthorized Access Vs. Web Attacks
The distinction between the two lies in their targets; unauthorized access aims at the system or network infrastructure, while web attacks focus on the application layer. Understanding these differences is essential for developing targeted security strategies to protect against both breach types.
WAAPs can mitigate risks related to unauthorized access, like attacks arising from weak passwords or stolen credentials. WAF mitigates risks arising from web application vulnerabilities.
Best Practices for using WAF and WAAP for comprehensive security monitoring
Integrating both WAF and WAAP enables you to build more robust security around your API landscape.
Integrate Threat Intelligence
With threat intelligence, your WAF and WAAP can stay as up-to-date as possible. Your WAAP should incorporate threat intelligence so it can adapt its detections, enabling a proactive defense. By incorporating this additional data, your WAAP can mitigate risks arising from potential vulnerabilities and exploits.
Track Traffic, User, and App Behavior
Both the WAF and WAAP should be able to analyze behavior across their respective layers of protection. You should ensure that your WAF can analyze traffic heuristics to match a profile to the traffic to your online presence. Your WAPP should be able to track user and application behavior to detect anomalies indicating potential unauthorized access or account takeovers.
Leverage AI/ML Detections
Both technologies should incorporate machine learning (ML) or artificial intelligence (AI). For example, a WAF with machine learning capabilities can make recommendations about what rules to relax or new rules that should be applied. Meanwhile, the WAAP should be able to use AI-driven analytics to understand normal traffic patterns and identify irregular behaviors that indicate potential risks.
Identify and Monitor API
Continuous monitoring of web applications and APIs is crucial for defending against vulnerabilities and exploitations. Your WAAP should help you identify the APIs across your environment, including:
- Zombie APIs: APIs not actively used, maintained, updated, or monitored
- Shadow APIs: APIs installed without appropriate approval and left ungoverned
Additionally, your WAAP should monitor API for coding errors and ensure they conform to security and regulatory requirements to mitigate risks like governance issues, data loss, and business disruption.
Mitigate Bot Risks
Between your WAF and WAAP, you should have comprehensive bot risk mitigation. At a minimum, a WAF should have static protections to mitigate risks from unsophisticated bots. To augment this, you should have a WAAP that distinguishes between legitimate and malicious bots using machine learning algorithms, crucially enhancing security by filtering suspicious traffic. Using behavioral analysis and fingerprint recognition, a WAAP can continuously adapt to threats and mitigate risk from automated attacks.
Vercara WAF and WAAP: complementary cyber Defense in a single solution
Vercara’s WAAP solutions deliver comprehensive protection from dynamic threats, blocking a high volume of malicious traffic and requests. Our WAF solution defends critical applications, even ones with complex workflows, against common threats targeting the application layer, including SQL injection, XSS, and CSRF. By employing positive and negative security capabilities, Vercara’s solution enables you to detect zero day threats and ones featuring malformed packets or non-RFC-compliance traffic.
Augmenting the WAF, our unified API security platform discovers and secures APIs across your network, protecting you against malicious bots and fraudulent activity. Our API security solution delivers real-time runtime visibility into, testing for, and monitoring over APIs so you can remediate errors quickly and conform to security and regulatory requirements.
Vercara’s WAAP detects and defends against malicious bots, effectively countering sophisticated bot attacks and business logic abuse.
To learn how Vercara enables your organization, contact us today.
