Deploy AWS WAF faster with Security Automations

You can now deploy AWS WAF managed rules as part of the Security Automations for AWS WAF solution. In this post, we show you how to get started and set up monitoring for this automated solution with additional recommendations.

This article discusses AWS WAF, a service that assists you in protecting against typical web attacks and bots that might disrupt availability, compromise security, or consume excessive resources. As requests for your websites are received by the underlying service, they’re forwarded to AWS WAF for inspection against your rules. AWS WAF informs the underlying service to either block, allow, or take another configured action when a request fulfills the criteria stated in your rules. AWS WAF is tightly integrated with Amazon CloudFront, Application Load Balancer (ALB), Amazon API Gateway, and AWS AppSync—all of which are routinely used by AWS customers to provide content for their websites and applications.

To provide a simple, purpose-driven deployment approach, our solutions builder teams developed Security Automations for AWS WAF, a solution that can help organizations that don’t have dedicated security teams to quickly deploy an AWS WAF that filters common web-based malicious activity. Security Automations for AWS WAF deploys a set of preconfigured rules to help you protect your applications from common web exploits.

This solution can be installed in your AWS accounts by launching the provided AWS CloudFormation template.

Security Automations for AWS WAF provides the following features and benefits:

• Helps secure your web applications with AWS managed rule groups
• Provide layer 7 flood protection with a predefined HTTP flood custom rule
• Helps block exploitation of vulnerabilities with a predefined scanners and probes custom rule
• Detect and deflect intrusion from bots with a honeypot endpoint using a bad bot custom rule
• Helps block malicious IP addresses based on AWS and external IP reputation lists
• Building a monitoring dashboard with Amazon CloudWatch
• Integration with AWS Service Catalog AppRegistry and AWS Systems Manager Application Manager

Figure 1: Design overview of the new Security Automations for AWS WAF solution

Getting started

Many customers begin their proofs of concept (POC) by using the AWS Management Console for AWS WAF to set up their very first AWS WAF, but quickly realize the benefits of automation, such as increased productivity, enforcing best practices, avoiding repetition, and so on. Manually managing AWS WAF can be time-consuming, especially if you want to duplicate complicated automations across multiple environments.

You can deploy this solution for new and existing supported AWS WAF resources. The implementation guide discusses architectural considerations, configuration steps, and operational best practices for deploying this solution in the AWS Cloud. It includes links to AWS CloudFormation templates and stacks that launch, configure, and run the AWS security, compute, storage, and other services required to deploy this solution on AWS, using AWS best practices for security and availability.

Before you launch the CloudFormation template, review the architecture and configuration considerations discussed in this guide. The template takes about 15 minutes to deploy and includes three basic steps:

Step 1. Launch the stack

1. Launch the CloudFormation template into your AWS account and select the desired AWS Region.
2. Enter values for the required parameters: Stack name and Application access log bucket name.
3. Review the other template parameters and adjust if necessary.

Step 2. Associate the web ACL with your web application

Associate your CloudFront web distributions or ALBs with the web ACL that this solution generates. You can associate as many distributions or load balancers as you want.

Step 3. Configure web access logging

Turn on web access logging for your CloudFront web distributions or ALBs, and send the log files to the appropriate Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) bucket. Save the logs in a folder matching the user-defined prefix. If no user-defined prefix is used, save the logs to AWSLogs (default log prefix AWSLogs/).

Customize the solution

This solution provides an example of how to use AWS WAF and other services to build security automations on the AWS Cloud. You can download the open source code from GitHub to apply customizations or build your own security automations that fit your needs. The solution builder team is planning to release a Terraform version for this solution in the near future.

Monitor the solution

This solution includes a Service Catalog AppRegistry resource to register the CloudFormation template and underlying resources as an application in both the Service Catalog AppRegistry and Systems Manager Application Manager. You can monitor the costs and operations data in the Systems Manager console, as shown in Figure 2 that follows.

Figure 2: Example of the application view for the Security Automations for AWS WAF stack in Application Manager

CloudWatch dashboards are customizable home pages in the CloudWatch console that you can use to monitor your resources in a single view, including visualizing AWS WAF logs as shown in Figure 3 that follows. The solution creates a simple dashboard that you can customize to monitor additional metrics, alarms and logs. If suspicious activity is reported, you can use the visuals to understand the traffic in more detail and drive incident response actions as needed. From here, you can investigate further by using specific queries with CloudWatch Logs Insights.

Figure 3: Example of an enhanced AWS WAF CloudWatch dashboard that can be built for monitoring your site traffic

Conclusion

In this post, you learned about using the AWS Security Automation template to quickly deploy AWS WAF. If you prefer a simpler solution, we recommend using the one-click CloudFront AWS WAF setup, which offers a simple way to deploy AWS WAF for your CloudFront distribution. By choosing the approach that aligns with your requirements, you can enhance the security of your web applications and safeguard them against potential threats.

For more solutions, visit the AWS Solutions Library.

 
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