Introduction
Security will become a major source of web
services accomplishment problems in the near future that a need for the next
generation of products that secures web applications is more of a sine qua non
than a simple requirement. What’s needed is a new modus operandi in managing these Web Application Problems (WAP). Today’s hackers have grown in
sophistication in attacking web-based deployed applications making the security
protection solutions offered falling short on multiple fronts. This is
precisely due to the core technological designs of matching attack signatures
as opposed to the traffic coming into the network. For the simple reason that
one web application varies from one another, using facile pattern matching is
just not good enough. For one, securing against the latest Layer 7 Web attacks
needs a security solution to be mindful of web application contexts and its
infrastructures.
Figure
1:WAF vs IPS: What’s the
Difference? | Source: https://www.lanner-america.com/
Recently, confusion has arisen between Web
Application Firewalls (WAF) vs. Intrusion Prevention Systems (IPS) platforms
vis-Ã -vis the differences between these two technologies. Moreover, IPS retailers
often add to the confusion by asserting that IPS Solutions delivers a more
complete web application protection. Obviously, even though both add an extra security
layer for a network, they work on different types of
traffic. Although IPS appears to protect a wider type of traffic, there is this
very specific one that only a WAF can do with. So, instead of competing, both
are compensating each other.
But for the sake of arguments, let
us scrutinizes these indispensable differences between Web Application
Firewalls and IPS solutions minutely, especially to Web Application Protection.
The WAF
Figure
2: How WAF works | Source: https://blog.xeonbd.com/ips-waf/
Web Application Firewall (WAF) platforms understand the Web traffic
constructs and keep track of the application’s state and client sessions. In
the same consideration as an IPS, WAFs can be a network or host-based. This
gives the means to enforce the thorough application state accuracy needed in
securing the Web application. WAF completely terminates and proxies every level
of connection because it has had absolute visibility into application layer
constructs. Thus, it can strictly apply security checks on the decoded request
contents. Since WAF uses both the positive security model and signature-based
model, it adequately makes certain that every user requests and responses
conform to anticipated application usage and allows only valid traffic. Thus,
it prevents both known and unknown application attacks with no signatures and
no false positives. Basically, WAFs are designed with the sole purpose of
protecting web applications/servers from web-based attacks the IPS cannot
prevent. The difference lies in the level of ability to analyzed the Layer 7 web
application rationale.
The IPS
Figure
3: IPS Architecture | Source: https://gbhackers.com
Intrusion Prevention System (IPS) is a more general-purpose
protection appliance. It provides protection on traffic of a wide variety of
protocol types, such as DNS, SMTP, TELNET, RDP, SSH, FTP among others. IPS
detects malicious traffic using different methods.
Since IPS solution products only work at the
network layer and have not had any application state knowledge, IPS cannot
validate encrypted sessions nor interpret application encoding strategies.
Furthermore, IPS lacks the ability of blocking application layer attacks. This will
ultimately prevents IPS technology from securing the most critical applications
in a network. IPS solutions can detect network level attacks such as CGI
attacks, stealth port scans and attacks directed at the protocols and allow or
deny any packets after comparing it to known attack signatures. At this
juncture, the structured and encoded data cannot be considered during this
comparison. This method of approach fails to avert most attacks or creates
false positives, contingent on the security strategies.