Product Overview: Signal Sciences Next-Gen WAF
Signal Sciences, now integrated with Fastly, offers a next-generation Web Application Firewall (WAF) and Runtime Application Self-Protection (RASP) solution designed to provide comprehensive protection for web applications, APIs, and microservices. This advanced security solution is tailored to meet the needs of modern software teams operating in diverse and dynamic environments.
Protection and Deployment
Signal Sciences protects your applications, APIs, and microservices wherever they are deployed, whether in containers, on-premises, in the cloud, or at the edge. This flexibility ensures that your web attack surface is covered across all architectures, including multi-cloud and hybrid cloud environments.
Key Features and Functionality
Advanced Threat Detection
- SmartParse Technology: Unlike traditional regex-based WAFs, Signal Sciences uses its proprietary SmartParse system, which leverages artificial intelligence and behavioral analysis to evaluate the context of each request. This approach significantly reduces false positives and provides highly accurate detection of malicious or anomalous payloads.
Comprehensive Threat Protection
- OWASP Top 10: Protects against both classic OWASP Top 10 attacks and advanced web attacks.
- Account Takeover (ATO): Blocks ATO attacks by inspecting web requests and correlating anomalous activity with malicious intent.
- API Protection: Stops API abuse by monitoring for unexpected values and parameters submitted by endpoints and blocking unauthorized requests.
- Bot Protection: Prevents bad bots from performing malicious actions against your websites and APIs.
- DDoS Protection: Prevents malicious automated traffic aimed at overwhelming your applications.
- Rate Limiting: Stops malicious and anomalous high-volume web requests, reducing web server and API utilization while allowing legitimate traffic through.
User-Friendly Management and Integration
- Power Rules: Allows users to configure rules without complicated scripting languages or regex modifications. Users can define inputs and outputs from a simple drop-down menu and use pre-built templates to defend against various threats such as account takeover attempts and bot activity.
- Real-Time Reporting and Alerting: Provides real-time reporting capabilities, historical threat data, and flexible alerting options via email or push notifications to apps like PagerDuty, Datadog, Slack, or Splunk. This ensures seamless integration into existing application security infrastructure.
Visibility and Performance
- Detailed Metrics and Logging: Offers visibility into request logs, allowing manual review of events and providing key metadata and header information. This helps in identifying and triaging issues quickly, ensuring site uptime and performance.
- Performance Optimization: Signal Sciences can be deployed without impacting the performance and user experience of your applications. It provides metrics such as client-side and server-side errors, response times, and other critical data points to help operations teams maintain optimal application performance.
Flexible Deployment and Integration
- Integration with Various Platforms: Supports integration with platforms like VMware Tanzu (formerly Pivotal), Palo Alto, Cisco Threat Response, and other tools, making it easy to incorporate into existing security and development workflows.
Conclusion
Signal Sciences Next-Gen WAF is a robust security solution that stands out for its advanced threat detection capabilities, user-friendly management interface, and flexible deployment options. It is designed to protect modern web applications and APIs from a broad spectrum of threats without compromising performance or requiring extensive tuning, making it an ideal choice for software teams in fast-paced development environments.