Web Application Firewall
In DXP, Web Application Firewall (WAF) is enabled, constantly monitoring the website traffic and filtering for malicious traffic at the web application layer. The WAF examines HTTP requests to your website, looking at GET and POST requests, and applies rules to filter illegitimate traffic from legitimate website visitors. Illegitimate traffic is challenged and blocked or stopped. See Open Systems Interconnection (OSI) Model.
How does WAF protect my website?
A WAF automatically protects from the following types of attacks:
- SQL injection, comment spam
- Cross-site scripting (XSS)
- Distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks
A WAF uses rulesets to block common attacks, like cross-site scripting (XSS) and SQL injections. Optimizely can update these rulesets at any time on the platform level to keep the WAF up-to-date with evolving attack trends. Because the DXP handles significant attack traffic, it optimizes new attack styles and adds new WAF rules to protect customers against these potential vulnerabilities. However, Optimizely does not typically update these rules on a customer by customer basis.
The WAF engine runs the OWASP ModSecurity Core Ruleset by default, protecting you against the OWASP Top 10 common vulnerabilities.
WAF and DXP service
- Automatic protection from diverse threats, with strong default rulesets, providing Application layer protection that is fully integrated with DDoS mitigation.
- Fast processing times with instant global updates.
- Cost-effectively fulfill PCI compliance by utilizing WAF to meet PCI DSS requirement 6.6.
- No hardware, software, or tuning is required because it is part of DXP.
There is no need to sacrifice speed for security. In the event of an attack, the DXP makes sure you are protected:
- New rules typically take effect globally in under 30 seconds.
- Less than one-millisecond latency for web visitors is common.
Supported WAF rules include:
- The Cloudflare baseline WAF rules.
- Blocking specific countries, IP addresses, and autonomous system numbers (ASNs) upon customer request to Support.
- Rate-limiting rules are supported only as a temporary incident mitigation measure (not as a permanent setting).
Any WAF rules beyond the previous are not supported by the platform and must be handled in code or by managing your own Cloudflare zonemanaging your own Cloudflare zone (orange-to-orange).
Compliance for PCI DSS requirement 6.6
You can cost-effectively fulfill PCI compliance using Digital Experience Cloud (DXC) WAF to meet Requirement 6.6. If you are a merchant who handles consumer credit card information, the following options meet the PCI DSS 2.0 and 3.0 Requirement 6.6:
- Deploy a WAF in front of your website. (WAF is included with DXC Service.)
- Conduct application vulnerability security reviews of your in-scope web applications.
The following list shows the DXP default ruleset for WAF, which is optimized for Optimizely applications and based on best practices. Custom rulesets cannot be defined at this time.
- OWASP Bad Robots – Detects bad web robots that are not from search engines but perform malicious searching and spidering of websites.
- OWASP Generic Attacks – Detects generic attacks against web-based applications without specific knowledge of the application. Detects things such as attempting to access an LDAP directory, injecting shell commands, and attacks against PHP.
- OWASP HTTP Policy – Enforces policies around the HTTP protocol, such as methods that are supported and headers that are allowed.
- OWASP Protocol Anomalies – Detects unusual use of the HTTP protocol that may indicate an attack but may also be legitimate.
- OWASP Protocol Violations – Detects violations of the HTTP protocol that often indicate an attacker attempting to penetrate a site.
- OWASP Request Limits – Detects excessively large numbers of HTTP headers, HTTP arguments, or files.
- OWASP Slr Et Lfi Attacks – Detects LFI attacks.
- OWASP Slr Et RFI Attacks – Detects RFI attacks.
- OWASP Slr Et SQLi Attacks – Detects SQLi attacks.
- OWASP Slr Et XSS Attacks – Detects XSS attacks.
- OWASP SQL Injection Attacks – Detects attacks against SQL servers that attempt to inject SQL statements through the web to leak information or take control of a SQL server.
- OWASP Trojans – Detects command web trojans.
- OWASP XSS Attacks – Detects cross-site scripting (XSS) attacks that may result in unwanted HTML inserted into web pages.
- OWASP Uri SQL Injection Attacks – Detects attacks against SQL servers that attempt to inject SQL statements through the web to leak information or take control of a SQL server through URIs.
- OWASP Uri XSS Attacks – Detects cross-site scripting (XSS) attacks that may result in unwanted HTML inserted into web pages through URIs.