Amazon WAF Features

Amazon WAF lets you create rules to filter web traffic based on conditions that include IP addresses, HTTP headers and body, or custom URIs. This gives you an additional layer of protection from web attacks that attempt to exploit vulnerabilities in custom or third party web applications. In addition, Amazon WAF makes it easy to create rules that block common web exploits like SQL injection and cross site scripting.

Amazon WAF allows you to create a centralized set of rules that you can deploy across multiple websites. This means that in an environment with many websites and web applications you can create a single set of rules that you can reuse across applications rather than recreating that rule on every application you want to protect.

Amazon WAF Bot Control is a managed rule group that gives you visibility and control over common and pervasive bot traffic that can consume excess resources, skew metrics, cause downtime, or perform other undesired activities. With just a few clicks, you can block, or rate-limit, pervasive bots, such as scrapers, scanners, and crawlers, or you can allow common bots, such as status monitors and search engines. The Bot Control managed rule group can be used alongside other Managed Rules for WAF or your own custom WAF rules to protect your applications.

Amazon WAF can be completely administered via APIs. This provides organizations with the ability to create and maintain rules automatically and incorporate them into the development and design process. For example, a developer who has detailed knowledge of the web application could create a security rule as part of the deployment process. This capability to incorporate security into your development process avoids the need for complex handoffs between application and security teams to make sure rules are kept up to date.

Amazon WAF can also be deployed and provisioned automatically with Amazon CloudFormation sample templates that allow you to describe all security rules you would like to deploy for your web applications.

Amazon WAF provides real-time metrics and captures raw requests that include details about IP addresses, geo locations, URIs, User-Agent and Referers. Amazon WAF is fully integrated with Amazon CloudWatch, making it easy to setup custom alarms when thresholds are exceeded or particular attacks occur. This information provides valuable intelligence that can be used to create new rules to better protect applications.