Protect against all OWASP-listed attacks, including the “top 10” (SQL Injection, cross-site scripting, CSRF, etc.), and recent additions such as API protection. Advanced logging and reporting provides deep view into traffic and attack details, enabling administrators to block, throttle, redirect, or take several other actions to maintain complete protection.

Barracuda Advanced Bot Protection uses cloud based machine learning to provide

• Bot spam detection — Reduce referrer spam and block comment spam

• Credential stuffing prevention — Block credential stuffing to help stop account takeover attacks

• Request risk scoring — Track and use advanced behavioral analytics to score incoming requests

• Client fingerprinting — Track users with better fidelity than IP addresses

Build positive security profiles for applications by sampling web traffic from trusted hosts. Once enabled, the positive security profiles allow administrators to enforce granular whitelist rules on sensitive parts of the application. This greatly reduces the risk of attacks and helps prevent zero-day vulnerabilities.

Often the first step of a targeted attack is to probe public-facing applications to learn about the underlying servers, databases, and operating systems. Cloaking prevents attack reconnaissance by suppressing server banners, error messages, HTTP headers, return codes, debug information, or backend IP addresses from leaking to a potential attacker.

Encrypt URLs before they are sent to clients, and ensure the original URLs or the directory structure are never exposed externally to prying eyes*. End users of the web applications interact and navigate the site using only encrypted URLs, which are decrypted by the WAF. The decryption process immediately identifies URL query or parameter tampering, malicious content injection or blind forceful browsing attacks.

* WAF models 660 and above

Using client source addresses, organizations can control access to web resources. The Barracuda Web Application Firewall can control access based on GeoIP to limit access only to specified regions. It is also integrated with the Barracuda Reputational Database and can identify suspicious IP addresses, bots, TOR networks and other anonymous proxies that are often used by attackers to hide their identity and location. Once an IP address is identified as a risk, administrators have the ability to block, limit, throttle, or issue a CAPTCHA challenge before allowing access.

Integrations: MaxMind

Integrate with Barracuda Vulnerability Manager, Cenzic Hailstorm, HPE Security WebInspect, HPE Security Fortify On Demand, or IBM AppScan to automatically configure an application’s security template and protect against identified issues. All of this is automatic using the output data from the scanners (without any administrator intervention).

Barracuda Web Application Firewall also integrates with over 20 vulnerability scanners via Denim Threadfix integration.

Seamless integration with Barracuda Advanced Threat Protection (BATP) to provide security against advanced threats. Simply add BATP to the Barracuda WAF to block advanced zero-hour threats. By analyzing files in a CPU-emulation based sandbox, it can detect, and block malware embedded deep inside files uploaded to websites or web applications.

In addition to HTTP and HTTPS traffic processing, Barracuda Web Application Firewall can also inspect FTP and FTPS traffic and can be configured to allow/deny specific FTP commands. It also provides inspection capabilities for application protocols like XML and JSON and can be configured to proxy HTTP2 as well as HTML5 websockets traffic.

Protect against advanced application-layer DDoS (SlowLoris, RUDY and Slow Read attacks) attacks which are different from volumetric ddos attacks with heuristic fingerprinting and IP reputation to identify real users from botnet. Secure against application DDoS using a variety of risk assessment techniques such as application-centric thresholds, protocol checks, session integrity, active and passive client challenges, historical client reputation block lists, geo-location, and anomalous idle-time detection.

Volumetric DDoS attacks are on the rise because the computational resources that are available to attackers make it very easy to launch full scale attacks that can bring an entire network down. Many times, the entry point for these attacks are web sites of organizations that bear the brunt of the load. Barracuda WAF offers a subscription-based DDoS protection cloud service that scrubs traffic before it reaches the intended websites. This allows the cloud service to identify patterns of DDOS attacks in the connections and block them.

Mobile application and REST APIs today rely on JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) to transfer data. However, this opens a whole new attack surface which is often overlooked and hard to secure by traditional scan-testing or pen-testing approaches. The Barracuda Web Application Firewall secures the entire attack surface of mobile applications and REST APIs, filters malicious inputs in requests with JSON payloads, helps ensure API SLAs to partners, and provides anti-pharming protection from rogue consumers. Interactive web applications using JSON with AJAX are similarly protected.

Applications that rely on XML can now be secured with an XML Firewall capability that secures applications against schema and WSDL poisoning, highly-nested elements, recursive parsing, and other XML-based attacks. This secures communications between client and application or between applications from different systems closing an often-overlooked attack vector.

Barracuda WAF supports load balancing of all types of applications. Load balancing ensures that subsequent requests from the same IP address will be routed to the same back-end server as the initial request. This requires an awareness of server health so subsequent requests are not routed to a server which is no longer responding. The Barracuda WAF can monitor server health by tracking server responses to actual requests and marking the server as out-of-service when errors exceed a user configured threshold. In addition, the Barracuda WAF can perform out-of-band health checks, requests created and sent to a server at configured time intervals to verify its health.

The Barracuda WAF provides enormous flexibility while deploying large applications in which each application module can be deployed on multiple servers. Requested content such as the URL of the module, HTTP Headers and parameters, is used to route content to the correct set of servers. This is also useful in scenarios where users should be redirected to different parts of the applications based on various criteria such as the mobile site, or a country specific site.

Caching: The Barracuda WAF speeds up application response time by caching static content and using it to respond to repeated requests for the same content. Caching rules can be tuned based on URL space, le size or le type.

Compression: The integrated compression engine in the Barracuda Web Application Firewall compresses data as it is sent out to the client. This capability is extremely useful in low bandwidth situations and makes application delivery faster.

Traffic Optimization: The Barracuda Web Application firewall employs multiple techniques such as connection-pooling and TCP multiplexing to optimize protocol performance. Connection pooling techniques enable Barracuda Web Application Firewall to cut down the overhead associated with creating and terminating connections, thereby cutting the time it takes to respond to client requests.

Inspects all outbound traffic for sensitive data leakage. Content such as credit card numbers, U.S. social security numbers, or any other custom patterns are identified and can either blocked or masked without administrator intervention. Furthermore, the information is logged and can be used by administrators to find potential leaks.

Simple, cost-effective assistance to help administrators comply with major application-specific requirements like PCI-DSS, HIPAA, FISMA, and SOX. Certified by numerous third-party labs including ICSA Labs, Barracuda Web Application Firewall directly satisfies section 6.6 of PCI-DSS and assists compliance with built-in PCI compliance reports. Its robust identity, access management and data loss prevention (DLP) capabilities ensure privacy of sensitive data.

The Barracuda Web Application Firewall supports the SAML v2 protocol for authentication and web based single sign-on (SSO), which means that it can act as a SAML Service Provider (SP) to SAML-compliant Identity Providers (IdP), saving you from the complexities of implementing SAML on your web servers. This facilitates SSO between the cloud and on-premise web applications as well as interoperability with Azure AD which supports SAML 2.0. The Barracuda Web Application Firewall also supports Federated Identity for authentication and single sign-on, and supports integration with Active Direction Federation Services (AD FS)

The Barracuda Web Application Firewall can be configured to require the client to provide a certificate for authentication, denying communication with clients who fail to do so.

It also provides server-side encryption, and can provide a certificate to the servers for client authentication (the Barracuda Web Application Firewall acting as the client to the back-end servers). Online Certificate Status Protocol (OCSP) and Certificate Revocation Lists (CRLs) are also supported to determine the current status of client digital certificates.

Securely publish not only AD FS but all the other web applications like SharePoint that rely on AD FS. Just like the Microsoft Web Application Proxy, the Barracuda WAF is deployed in the perimeter network - the DMZ. It does not require joining the domain and only requires port 443 access to the AD FS farm. It intercepts HTTP/S requests to published applications and provides protection against malicious HTTP/S requests from the Internet.

The Barracuda WAF fully integrates Active Directory or any other RADIUS or LDAP-compatible authentication services. Combined with the strong access control capabilities, administrators can provide granular control over which users or groups are able to access specific resources. For securing Kerberos-enabled environments, it can also perform authentication to the protected web application on behalf of the user, including single-sign-on to multiple Kerberos services.

The Barracuda WAF integrates with a number of two-factor authentication technologies including client certificates, SMS PASSCODES, and hardware tokens such as RSA SecurID to provide strong user authentication.

Integrations: SMS PASSCODES, RSA SecurID

Powerful graphical reporting provides immediate insight into compliance, threat activity, web traffic and regulatory compliance. More than 50 different pre-defined reports are available, which can be easily customized further, using numerous filters for attack types, traffic, time range, and more.

Generated reports are interactive, with drill-down capability. Reports span PCI compliance, security, audit, web traffic and geo-location analytics. They can be generated on-demand, or scheduled for periodic delivery to multiple recipients over email or FTP.

All client requests, administrator modifications, and firewall actions are logged. This provides a comprehensive audit log for compliance and security policy tuning. Data from the logs are used by the Web Application Firewall to build graphical reports on attacks, web traffic, compliance or a number of other analytical reports. Logs can also be exported to 3rd party analytics suite via Syslog or FTP.

Barracuda Web Application Firewall integrates with many popular SIEM solutions out of the box. Logs are sent in the specific format as required by these SIEM solutions, ensuring maximum ease of integration.

In addition, the Barracuda WAF has a highly customizable log export engine. Any SIEM solution that uses syslog can be integrated with this, and admins can define specific log formats to ensure complete integration.

Integrations: HPE ArcSight, Splunk, RSA EnVision, Symantec SIM and QRadar

Out of the box support for multiple log analytics platforms (ELK stack, Microsoft OMS and Microsoft Azure Event Hub). Send logs over syslog to any other platform, with custom log formats.

Barracuda Web Application Firewalls can be clustered in active / passive or active / active pairs with failover to ensure instant recovery. Security configurations and deployments are automatically synchronized between the clusters, providing instant recovery from any outages.

With role-based administration, Barracuda WAF Control Center makes it easy to centrally manage multi-tenant deployments of the Barracuda Web Application Firewall.

Barracuda WAF comes with a complete REST API that enables you to configure and monitor the appliance programmatically. The functionality of the device is exposed in Representational State Transfer compliant interfaces which can be exercised via any programming language of your choice. REST API allows you to automate, reduce time-to-market and costs by leveraging economies of scale in a programmable environment.

Configuration management software like Puppet, Chef and Ansible are used by organizations worldwide to automate deployments and configuration workflows. The Barracuda Web Application Firewall supports custom modules enabling DevOps practitioners to automate their Barracuda WAF configuration.

Managing application security policies across multiple units can quickly become an error-prone hassle. The Barracuda WAF features security templates that provide the ability to define baseline security settings to use as a model for security policies. By using templates, you can quickly create security policies designed to safeguard a specific application, web-portal, platform, framework or parts thereof. Templates increase productivity, reduce manual errors and deployment time, and ensure policy compliance.

The Barracuda WAF Control Center is the centralized management system that allows administrators to manage multiple geo-dispersed Barracuda Web Application Firewalls with varying configurations from a single console. A single pane of glass can manage hybrid hardware, virtual, and cloud deployments, and enables efficient, secure management for system administrators.

The built-in Certificate reports provides a single pane view of all the certificates installed on the various connected Barracuda WAF units, and provides expiration reporting based on expiration date ranges.

Centralized Notification view gives you consolidated, granular info on the status of all configured services. Alerts from multiple connected WAFs are batched and sent out together to minimize information overload.