Six Challenges of Applying WAF in the Cloud and How to Solve Them

Web Application Firewall (WAF) is a key component of cloud security, specifically designed to protect web applications by filtering and monitoring HTTP traffic between a web application and the Internet. A WAF can help mitigate various types of threats, including common web exploits and vulnerabilities.

However, there are many challenges we may meet when applying WAF in the cloud environment. I concluded six challenges here and let's see how to solve them.

1.Complex Deployment Scenarios in K8s

• Challenge: In a Kubernetes (K8s) environment, using WAF can result in the need to configure sites separately in both the WAF and K8s, leading to doubled workload when launching many web services.
• Solution: SafeLine's fully open interface model perfectly integrates with K8s. Using user resources customization in K8s and GitOps tools, the sites needing protection can be deployed simultaneously to K8s ingress and WAF, reducing manpower and business management costs.

2.Poor Management Efficiency with Multiple Clouds

• Challenge: When enterprises use multiple clouds, business becomes more dispersed, and security personnel cannot use a single WAF cluster for unified management and protection. Complex management logic significantly reduces process configuration efficiency, increases manpower costs, and introduces risks.
• Solution: SafeLine offers deep adaptation to multi-cloud business scenarios with different deployment models, achieving precise traffic routing. Enterprises can use SafeLine's unified management mechanism to centrally manage traffic detection nodes in multiple clouds, maintaining overall resources under a single management logic and controlling overall risks from a top-down perspective.

3.Shortcomings of Traditional WAFs in East-West Traffic Protection

• Challenge: Traditional WAFs can only protect north-south traffic and lack detection and protection for horizontal traffic between services. In the cloud, threats from this type of traffic can be significant and may cause internal system failures.
• Solution: SafeLine uses unique embedded deployment technology in Service Mesh by embedding the T1K module. When enterprises interact with traffic through sidecars, T1K modules can provide security protection for east-west traffic through traffic diversion, hijacking, and blocking instructions. Protection includes API security, user behavior detection, permission anomaly monitoring, and malicious traffic protection, ensuring secure traffic interactions between internal systems.

4.Difficult Resource Control with Frequent Business Changes

• Challenge: The fluctuation in traffic often makes it difficult for enterprises to accurately allocate WAF resources. Over-provisioning wastes resources, while under-provisioning affects business development, requiring long-term manual management and high manpower costs.
• Solution: SafeLine uses a fully distributed microservice architecture, deploying detection capabilities modularly, and combined with K8s' quick container launch and shutdown mechanisms, achieves easy automatic elastic scaling. It automatically adjusts WAF resources based on traffic peaks and valleys, effectively saving operational costs while handling varying traffic with ease.

5.Data Isolation and Permission Differentiation for Multiple Cloud Tenants

• Challenge: When providing cloud resource rental services, enterprises (typically cloud providers) often face numerous business tenants demanding their own security network capabilities and data isolation between tenants.
• Solution: SafeLine supports multi-tenant permission allocation, achieving permission isolation of business sites and related traffic data between different tenants. Administrators can allocate permissions and resources based on tenant needs, ensuring tenant cloud business security and control.

6.Higher Business Continuity Requirements with Multi-Dimensional Traffic

• Challenge: In cloud-native WAF deployment scenarios, multi-dimensional traffic detection is common. Normal traffic paths need to pass WAF detection smoothly to operate. However, when WAF goes down, massive business traffic faces forced termination, leading to significant losses.
• Solution:
  • For north-south traffic: At the onset of a failure, SafeLine adds a millisecond delay and attempts to let the traffic enter Bypass state, ensuring business operations without interruptions until the health check finds the detection engine restored.
  • For east-west traffic: During a failure, SafeLine uses Bypass to allow traffic to temporarily skip the WAF. It then samples a request to attempt processing, continuing Bypass if it fails, ensuring normal business operations.

By selecting appropriate deployment strategies based on the specific needs and usage levels of Kubernetes, WAF can maximize its effectiveness in the cloud. SafeLine, with its microservice capabilities and years of practical experience, continues to provide cloud security protection, ensuring safer and more efficient business development.

Here is the free community edition of SafeLine WAF:
https://github.com/chaitin/SafeLine
Any question about SafeLine WAF, join the discord community:
https://discord.gg/CXTnVcYk