Comparison Table: open-appsec vs Barracuda WAF vs AWS WAF
Feature | Barracuda WAF | AWS WAF | open-appsec |
Security | | | |
ML-based protection against web attacks | Yes (attack detection signatures are needed) | No (uses rulesets and policies) | Yes (no signature needed) |
Zero-day protection | No | No | Yes |
API protection | Yes | Yes | Yes |
Protection against OWASP TOP 10 attacks | Yes | Yes | Yes |
Anti-bot | Yes | Yes (Bot Control feature) | Yes (but as a premium feature) |
Management | | | |
Declarative configuration and deployment | No | Yes | Yes |
SaaS Web-based Event Management & Dashboards | Yes | Yes | Yes |
Terraform | Yes | Yes | Yes |
Pricing | | | |
Free version | Yes (for 30 days) | No | Yes (for unlimited HTTP requests) |
Plans | | Web ACL: $5 per month Rules: $1 per month Requests: $0.60 per 1 million requests | Premium edition: pay-as-you-go per 1M HTTP requests Enterprise edition: annual payment per 100M HTTP requests |
Barracuda Web Application Firewall Review
Barracuda WAF is a web application firewall that deploys Smart Signatures and application policies to block malicious web attacks. In addition to protecting web applications and APIs against OWASP 10, data leakage, and DDOS, Barracuda WAF offers server cloaking to hide HTTP headers, error messages, return codes, and backend IP addresses. This ensures protection against the cyber kill chain’s first step surveillance, such as port scanning and ping sweeps.
Barracuda WAF can be seamlessly integrated with popular SIEM solutions and vulnerability scanners. Integrating Barracuda WAF with Barracuda Advanced Threat Protection assures protection against sophisticated zero-day threats. This integration utilizes sandboxing to analyze files to detect and block deeply embedded malware.
Barracuda Active Threat Intelligence collects real-time threat data from a global network of sensors and user traffic. This data is processed using ML and pushed out to connected units, including Barracuda WAF, thus ensuring active detection of new threats and actors. Also, its dashboard provides detailed reports and visualizations of traffic patterns and client-side protection features that help analyze bots and scripts in depth.
Pros and Cons of Barracuda WAF
Pros | Cons |
Easy, straightforward installation, and is stable during OS upgradation. | Expensive to implement. |
Granular access control. | Better WAF scaling and flexibility are required. |
Deep visibility into attacks and traffic patterns. | UI can be complicated to understand when there are numerous reports about analyzed web traffic. |
Easy-to-use console and user-friendly dashboards. | No free trial is available. |
It offers a cloud-based ML approach for advanced bot detection. | Its numerous features suit only huge networks and not small ones. |
It uses heuristic fingerprinting and IP reputation to protect against application layer DDOS attacks. | |
AWS WAF Review
AWS WAF (Amazon Web Services Web Application Firewall) is an application security service that protects web applications from malicious traffic. It operates at the application layer of the OSI model and inspects and controls incoming HTTP and HTTPS traffic.
The AWS WAF enables you to define custom security rules based on IP addresses, HTTP headers, and query strings, which you can use to block malicious traffic and protect your applications. It integrates with other AWS services, such as Amazon CloudFront, Amazon API Gateway, and Application Load Balancer, and can be easily managed through the AWS Management Console.
This cost-effective service is designed to scale automatically to match the incoming traffic volume, ensuring your application is always protected. With AWS WAF, you can protect your applications from common web attacks such as SQL injection, cross-site scripting, and session hijacking and comply with various security standards and regulations.
Features of the AWS Web Application Firewall
Custom rules:
The AWS WAF uses this feature to allow or block traffic based on specific conditions. They’re created using a set of predefined conditions that allow you to define your custom logic for each rule.
Real-time Protection
This AWS WAF operates by inspecting incoming HTTP and HTTPS traffic to your web application and evaluating it against the custom security rules you have defined. AWS WAF also provides real-time logging and reporting, allowing you to monitor the traffic to your application and quickly detect and respond to any security incidents.
Pros and Cons of AWS WAF.
Pros | Cons |
AWS WAF can automatically scale to match the incoming traffic. | AWS WAF may block legitimate requests, resulting in false positives. |
It can be easily integrated with other AWS services. | Setting up and configuring AWS WAF can be complex and requires technical expertise. |
It provides a set of customizable rules to allow or block requests based on some set conditions like IP addresses, query strings, and headers. | No zero-day pre-emptive protection |
It is cost-effective because its pricing is based on the number of rules and the volume of web requests processed. | |
Its integration with AWS CloudWatch gives you real-time visibility into metrics and protectionagainst malicious requests, ensuring that your application is always secure. | |
AWS WAF provides security features that help you to comply with industry regulations and standards. | |
open-appsec Web Application Firewall Review
Are you looking for a way to block attacks on your web application before they happen? open-appsec uses machine learning to continuously detect andpreemptively block threats before they can do any damage. Ourcode has also been published on GitHub, and the effectiveness of our WAF has been successfully proven in numeroustests by third parties. Try open-appsec in thePlayground today.
The open-appsec WAF considers your web application structure and user interaction to identify patterns, thus automatically filtering out and blocking malicious threat actors. The open-appsec WAF is a web application firewall that uses machine learning to continuously learn about new, sophisticated attacks, thus eliminating the need for exception creation like traditional WAF solutions. Its machine learning analysis functions consider your web application structure and user interaction to identify patterns, thus automatically filtering out and blocking malicious threat actors.
The following are some key features of the open-appsec WAF:
open-appsec’s ML-based web application firewall ensures no false positives and minimal need for tuning.
● It uses behavioral-based anti-bot to identify and block malicious bots before intrusion, data theft, or harm to customer experience.
● Its Intrusion Prevention system comes with custom Snort 3.0 signature support. This gives real-time metrics of packet logging and web traffic analysis.
● It offers IPS protection against 2800+ web CVEs based on Check Point award-winning NSS-certified IPS.
● It allows integration into modern environments and workloads for the public cloud and Kubernetes.
● It facilitates integration into CI/CD workflows supporting Kubernetes Ingress, Docker, and Linux servers.
● HTTPS traffic monitoring allows you to store your SSL certificates and private keys locally or on a public cloud (AWS/Azure).
● Enterprise-grade SaaS Web UI, GraphQL API, and Infrastructure-as-code using Terraform for easy management and maintenance.
Additionally, the open-appsec WAF can be deployed as a Docker container, Agent for Linux, and Kubernetes Ingress Controller and centrally managed by Fog -the master SaaS component that provides registration, policy update, configuration updates, and software updates.
It is also responsible for logging data and learning data synchronization. Not only this, you can upgrade your agents manually, automatically, or schedule it for a specific time. This easy and flexible upgrade is due to GraphQL API and Terraform (for Infrastructure-as-code) as automation methods that allow you to easily create, read, update or delete any object in the system.
Meanwhile, the open-appsec WAFs detect, learn and prevent mode accurately decipher if a request is legitimate or malicious. It does this by utilizing two machine-learning algorithms to analyze HTTP web requests. These algorithms protect your web applications and APIs against well-known, new, sophisticated web attack techniques and CVEs.
Furthermore, the open-appsec WAF allows you to view audit logs under its monitoring section, where you can automatically create detailed audit logs for any configuration change. This is a great feature for users of other WAFs and API security tools who frequently complain about not having a proper, easy-to-use, and understandable event monitoring and logging system. The open-appsec WAF, therefore, offers an easy-to-use dashboard, all thanks to its SaaS web-based event management portals and support team.
An ML-powered WAF has been introduced as a novel security measure, though it only has a small user base. There is limited information available online about it. It provides ample cloud log storage to both free and paid users. Automatic upgrades and support are provided exclusively to premium users. Its implementation does not slow down web speeds, and the rate of false positives is low.
Pros and Cons of open-appsec
Pros | Cons |
It uses an ML-based approach to protect web applications from attacks. | It has a small user base. |
It provides ample cloud log storage to both free and paid users. | There is limited information available online about it. |
Automatic upgrades and support are provided exclusively to premium users. | Not a lot of information is available on the internet. |
Its implementation does not increase web latency. | |
There’s a low rate of false positives. | |
Conclusion
All three solutions offer protection against OWASP 10, bad bots, and zero days. So which WAF is the one for you? If you are looking for a solution with an ML-based approach that uses threat detection signatures, then Barracuda WAF is an option. If you want to protect your application layer assets from malicious web traffic, then AWS WAF could suit your requirements. However, it will not benefit you if you want ML-based features.
If you want a free version of an ML-based security solution with no limitations, then open-appsec would perfectly satisfy your requirements. Its straightforward pricing plans could further help you to leverage its advanced features and strengthen the security of your web applications and APIs.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is Barracuda WAF-as-a-service?
Barracuda WAF-as-a-Service is a cloud-delivered application security service that can be deployed anywhere it is hosted. With Barracuda WAF-as-a-Service, organizations can benefit from the security expertise of the Barracuda Networks without investing in and maintaining dedicated hardware or software.
Does AWS WAF protect against SQL injection?
Yes, it does. AWS WAF protects against SQL injection attacks by examining incoming web requests using pre-set rules and blocking those that contain malicious SQL code.
Can WAF prevent ransomware?
A Web Application Firewall (WAF) can help prevent some ransomware attacks, but it should not be treated as a standalone solution. WAFs are designed to secure web applications by filtering and blocking malicious traffic based on predefined security rules. However, ransomware attacks can often bypass WAFs by using legitimate network protocols and legitimate credentials to access the target systems, making it difficult for the WAF to detect malicious traffic. To effectively protect against ransomware attacks, organizations should adopt a multi-layered security approach that includes WAFs and other security measures such as endpoint protection, regular backups, and user education.
