Definition

A web application firewall (WAF) is a security measure designed to protect web applications from various types of cyber threats, such as SQL injections, cross-site scripting (XSS), and distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks. It acts as a filter between the internet and your web application, monitoring and analyzing incoming traffic to identify and block any malicious or suspicious activity. When using AWS, you can leverage their AWS WAF service to implement a web application firewall for your applications. AWS WAF offers a highly scalable and managed solution to protect your web applications hosted on AWS. To use AWS WAF, you need to follow a few steps.

Using AWS

First, you need to define rules that specify the conditions under which the firewall should allow or block incoming requests. These rules can be based on IP addresses, HTTP headers, query strings, or even patterns in the request body. Once the rules are defined, you can then create a web ACL (Access Control List) that associates these rules with your web application. The web ACL acts as a container for your rules, allowing you to manage them as a group. Finally, you can associate the web ACL with your AWS resources, such as Amazon CloudFront distributions or Application Load Balancers, to start protecting your web applications. AWS WAF will then inspect the incoming requests against the defined rules and take appropriate actions, such as blocking or allowing the request, based on the rule conditions. With AWS WAF, you can gain granular control over the traffic