NSFOCUS WAAP: A Future-Ready Solution for Web and API Security Challenges

NSFOCUS WAAP: A Future-Ready Solution for Web and API Security Challenges

November 23, 2023 | NSFOCUS

In the digital age, Web application and API security (WAAP) has demonstrated the importance of the development of the web application and API economy, and it is becoming the new standard of the next generation of WAF.

WAAP is essential in today’s digital environment. As organizations increasingly rely on web applications and APIs to support business operations, their security has become increasingly critical. WAAP not only focuses on the security of websites and applications, but also emphasizes comprehensive protection of data transmission, storage, and processing. By implementing powerful defense mechanisms, including intrusion detection, authentication, data encryption, and vulnerability management, WAAP effectively defends against a wide range of network threats, ensuring the confidentiality and integrity of sensitive information.

In addition, the importance of WAAP is also reflected in the protection of APIs, as API vulnerabilities can lead to unauthorized access, data leakage, and network attacks. Overall, WAAP is a comprehensive security strategy that not only protects the interests of organizations and users, but also maintains the overall stability of the digital ecosystem.   

NSFOCUS WAAP solution is a comprehensive and easy-to-use solution that can help organizations protect their cloud web applications and APIs from a wide range of threats. In the Market Guide for Cloud Web Application and API Protection (1) published by Gartner recently, NSFOCUS Cloud WAAP was again featured in the report as a representative vendor.

NSFOCUS WAAP Capabilities

Web Security

NSFOCUS WAAP solution is designed to protect web applications from a variety of vulnerability attacks. It provides a comprehensive security model that combines static rules and dynamic syntax and semantic analysis to effectively defend against OWASP TOP 10 and other common vulnerability attacks. The solution supports both on-premises and cloud deployment to meet the needs of web applications of different scales and complexities. It also provides a user-friendly management interface to improve the efficiency of security operations. In addition, the solution supports various public cloud and private cloud environments and is available in both virtual machine, containerized software and SaaS forms, covering all-directional traffic detection for single-tier applications to microservices in cloud native scenarios.

Bot Management

NSFOCUS WAAP solution focuses on advanced automated tools to effectively solve Layer 7 DDoS and various types of abuse attacks. t can accurately identify and handle traffic from automated attacks such as crawling, taking advantage of vulnerabilities to obtain maximum benefits, and vulnerability scanning.  This helps to reduce the risk of information leakage and vulnerability exposure. The solution also provides attack intent analysis to help users assess the business risk index of applications. It provides visual results from a business asset perspective, including attack path records, attack time overviews, and business impact statistics. This helps customers turn security capabilities into real business value.

API Protection

NSFOCUS WAAP solution comes with a wealth of API protection rules that cover dozens of different types of web attack features. The rules are packaged in personalized templates for one-click application and quick effect. This can effectively protect against attacks such as injection attacks against APIs, vulnerability attacks against open source frameworks, and remote command execution attacks. The solution also uses automatic tool identification technology to prevent black and gray industries from abusing APIs, exploiting logical vulnerabilities, or brute-force login. Based on an accurate detection engine, the solution can quickly block attack behaviors and invocations against APIs, preventing attackers from exploiting APIs.

DDoS Protection

NSFOCUS WAAP solution provides both 3, 4 and 7-layer DDoS protection capabilities. In scenarios where bandwidth resources are limited, it offers SaaS-based T-level traffic scrubbing capabilities in the cloud. It incorporates a variety of protection policies and algorithms to effectively guard against traffic-based attacks, state exhaustion attacks, and application layer attacks. With 24/7 SOC support, customers can rapidly respond to attack incidents, providing effective protection against various known and unknown DDoS attacks

Cloud-Native WAF Adapting to Cloud-Native Architecture

With NSFOCUS’s exploration and years of experience in cloud-native technology, the WAF can adapt to cloud-native architecture. It not only supports various deployment modes like daemon sets and deployments but also integrates with various cloud-native management frameworks such as Kubernetes, Openshift, and Service Mesh. Through a unified cloud-native WAF security control platform, it manages and analyzes security data for all cloud-native WAF security probes. With cloud-native WAF security probes, it captures web traffic at the pod level, ensuring no east-west traffic session goes unnoticed. It also traces and visualizes application call access sequences, creating a visualization of business links within the cloud-native environment.

Cluster Deployment for Stable Web Services with High-Volume Traffic

As user business scenarios evolve, demands for the performance upgrade of security products and business stability guarantees increase. NSFOCUS WAAP provides various cluster deployment solutions, allowing businesses to go online without network interruption, conduct gray upgrades and cutovers without affecting operations, and quickly divert traffic for emergency troubleshooting, ensuring high stability for web services. It supports multi-node deployment locally, remotely, and in the cloud, offering standardized management, and reducing human resource input. Multiple devices can synchronize capacity expansion, centrally controlling protective assets and strategies to enhance operational efficiency. Real-time health monitoring of business and device statuses promptly identifies risks, and one-click collection of multi-dimensional logs facilitates quick troubleshooting.

Enhanced API security

APIs are being used more and more as another representation of web applications, and there are also increasing attacks targeting APIs. In addition to the API security capabilities included in WAAP, NSFOCUS also supports different API security management capabilities such as scanning, auditing, and access control, covering all API security risks mentioned in the OWASP API Security TOP10, and providing API asset identification, sensitive data discovery, abnormal behavior analysis, data access control, vulnerability identification, and security event traceability. It also offers an API security analysis platform to display the entire lifecycle of API security visually, protecting enterprise API security and normal operations.

Conclusion

NSFOCUS WAAP solution ensures the healthy operation of enterprise web and API applications and prevents various cyber threats through comprehensive defense measures, including robust network protection, application security, and data privacy protection. Its enhanced security protection of APIs strengthens trust in digital interactions, avoiding potential data breaches and unauthorized access. The flexibility of deployment methods and adaptability to cloud-native application architecture make NSFOCUS WAAP not only effective against current threat challenges but also well-suited for the demands of future digital development.

Reference

[1] Gartner, Market Guide for Cloud Web Application and API Protection, November 2023

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