Skip to main content

AWS Web Application Firewall

Page topics

General

Open all

AWS WAF lets you create rules to filter web traffic based on conditions that include IP addresses, HTTP headers and body, or custom URIs. This gives you an additional layer of protection from web attacks that attempt to exploit vulnerabilities in custom or third party web applications. In addition, AWS WAF makes it easy to create rules that block common web exploits like SQL injection and cross site scripting.

AWS WAF allows you to create a centralized set of rules that you can deploy across multiple websites. This means that in an environment with many websites and web applications you can create a single set of rules that you can reuse across applications rather than recreating that rule on every application you want to protect.

The guided setup offers application developers an intuitive single-page workflow, reducing configuration steps by up to 80% reducing error and reducing implementation time from hours to just 20 minutes. By selecting your application type (such as enterprise business application), you can activate preconfigured security defaults tailored to your needs. The system then automatically customizes protection parameters and offers contextual help throughout the process, ensuring a user-friendly experience regardless of technical expertise—all while achieving up to 80% reduction in configuration steps.

Strengthen your security posture with continuous, data-driven recommendations from AWS WAF. Get actionable insights to optimize your protection settings based on real-time traffic analysis and emerging threats. Our intelligent system helps you maintain robust security by suggesting rule refinements and identifying potential vulnerabilities, all while reducing the complexity of security management. Stay ahead of evolving risks with expert guidance that makes it easy to adapt and strengthen your security posture.

Leverages AWS's extensive security expertise and real-world threat intelligence to provide specialized protection packs - essentials, recommended, or you build it - that allows customers to choose and customize security controls based on their specific needs, from foundational OWASP Top 10 coverage to sophisticated application-specific protections. You can easily customize key security controls like rate limiting and geographic restrictions, or rely on AWS-recommended defaults.

A unified, actionable dashboard combines native AWS security metrics, real-time threat monitoring, and rule performance data—enabling teams to quickly identify and respond to threats through event pattern analysis, blocked requests, and automated alerts. From this comprehensive interface, security teams can analyze trends, tune protections, and access continuous recommendations to strengthen overall security posture. Additionally, a dedicated partner solutions page streamlines access to specialized protections from AWS Marketplace, making it easy to discover and deploy additional security capabilities.

AWS WAF Bot Control is a managed rule group that gives you visibility and control over common and pervasive bot traffic that can consume excess resources, skew metrics, cause downtime, or perform other undesired activities. With just a few clicks, you can block, or rate-limit, pervasive bots, such as scrapers, scanners, and crawlers, or you can allow common bots, such as status monitors and search engines. The Bot Control managed rule group can be used alongside other Managed Rules for WAF or your own custom WAF rules to protect your applications.

Learn more

AWS WAF Fraud Control - Account Takeover Prevention is a managed rule group that monitors your application’s login page for unauthorized access to user accounts using compromised credentials. You can use the rule group to help protect against credential stuffing attacks, brute force login attempts, and other anomalous login activities. With optional JavaScript and iOS/Android SDKs, you can receive additional telemetry on user devices that attempt to log in to your application to better protect your application against automated login attempts by bots. Account Takeover Prevention is part of Managed Rules for AWS and can be used together with Bot Control to effectively defend your application against bot attacks.

Account Creation Fraud Prevention is a managed rule group that monitors your application’s sign-up or registration page for creation of fake or fraudulent accounts. You can use the rule group to help protect against abuse such as promotional or sign-up abuse, loyaly or rewards abuse and phishing. With the recommended JavaScript and iOS/Android SDKs, you can receive additional telemetry on user devices that attempt to sign-up to your application to better protect your application against automated attempts by bots. Account Creation Fraud Prevention is part of Managed Rules for AWS and can be used together with Bot Control to effectively defend your application against bot attacks.

AWS WAF can be completely administered via APIs. This provides organizations with the ability to create and maintain rules automatically and incorporate them into the development and design process. For example, a developer who has detailed knowledge of the web application could create a security rule as part of the deployment process. This capability to incorporate security into your development process avoids the need for complex handoffs between application and security teams to make sure rules are kept up to date.

AWS WAF can also be deployed and provisioned automatically with AWS CloudFormation sample templates that allow you to describe all security rules you would like to deploy for your web applications delivered by Amazon CloudFront.

AWS WAF provides real-time metrics and captures raw requests that include details about IP addresses, geo locations, URIs, User-Agent and Referrers. AWS WAF is fully integrated with Amazon CloudWatch, making it easy to setup custom alarms when thresholds are exceeded or particular attacks occur. This information provides valuable intelligence that can be used to create new rules to better protect applications.

You can centrally configure and manage AWS WAF deployments across multiple AWS accounts by using AWS Firewall Manager. As new resources are created, you can ensure that they comply with a common set of security rules. Firewall Manager automatically audits and informs your security team when there is a policy violation, so they can respond immediately and take action. To learn more about Firewall Manager, visit the product website.