AWS Security Blog

Category: AWS WAF

The three most important AWS WAF rate-based rules

In this post, we explain what the three most important AWS WAF rate-based rules are for proactively protecting your web applications against common HTTP flood events, and how to implement these rules. We share what the Shield Response Team (SRT) has learned from helping customers respond to HTTP floods and show how all AWS WAF […]

Automatically update AWS WAF IP sets with AWS IP ranges

Note: This blog post describes how to automatically update AWS WAF IP sets with the most recent AWS IP ranges for AWS services. This related blog post describes how to perform a similar update for Amazon CloudFront IP ranges that are used in VPC Security Groups. You can use AWS Managed Rules for AWS WAF […]

Customize requests and responses with AWS WAF

September 21, 2021: The example use case for request tagging with ALB listener rules was removed, since it doesn’t apply to every case. In March 2021, AWS introduced support for custom responses and request header insertion with AWS WAF. This blog post will demonstrate how you can use these new features to customize your AWS […]

Automatically update security groups for Amazon CloudFront IP ranges using AWS Lambda

June 21, 2023: This blog post is out of date. You should now use the new managed prefix list for CloudFront in your Security Group instead of this custom Lambda solution. Please refer to this blog post for detailed info. Amazon CloudFront is a content delivery network that can help you increase the performance of […]

Centrally manage AWS WAF (API v2) and AWS Managed Rules at scale with Firewall Manager

October 29, 2021: AWS KMS is replacing the term customer master key (CMK) with AWS KMS key and KMS key. The concept has not changed. To prevent breaking changes, AWS KMS is keeping some variations of this term. More info. September 9, 2021: Amazon Elasticsearch Service has been renamed to Amazon OpenSearch Service. See details. […]

How to enhance Amazon CloudFront origin security with AWS WAF and AWS Secrets Manager

Whether your web applications provide static or dynamic content, you can improve their performance, availability, and security by using Amazon CloudFront as your content delivery network (CDN). CloudFront is a web service that speeds up distribution of your web content through a worldwide network of data centers called edge locations. CloudFront ensures that end-user requests […]

Automate AWS Firewall Manager onboarding using AWS Centralized WAF and VPC Security Group Management solution

Many customers—especially large enterprises—run workloads across multiple AWS accounts and in multiple AWS regions. AWS Firewall Manager service, launched in April 2018, enables customers to centrally configure and manage AWS WAF rules, audit Amazon VPC security group rules across accounts and applications in AWS Organizations, and protect resources against distributed DDoS attacks. In this blog […]

Automatically updating AWS WAF Rule in real time using Amazon EventBridge

December 4, 2020: This post has been updated to include links to the CloudFormation templates used in the solution. In this post, I demonstrate a method for collecting and sharing threat intelligence between Amazon Web Services (AWS) accounts by using AWS WAF, Amazon Kinesis Data Analytics, and Amazon EventBridge. AWS WAF helps protect against common […]

Deploying defense in depth using AWS Managed Rules for AWS WAF (part 2)

In this post, I show you how to use recent enhancements in AWS WAF to manage a multi-layer web application security enforcement policy. These enhancements will help you to maintain and deploy web application firewall configurations across deployment stages and across different types of applications. In part 1 of this post I describe the technologies […]

Defense in depth using AWS Managed Rules for AWS WAF (part 1)

In this post, I discuss how you can use recent enhancements in AWS WAF to manage a multi-layer web application security enforcement policy. These enhancements will help you to maintain and deploy web application firewall configurations across deployment stages and across different types of applications. The post is in two parts. This first part describes […]