The WAF identifies and blocks malicious attacks intertwined into safe-looking website traffic that may have slipped via the standard security solutions. This is why a WAF plays a vital role in preventing attacks like session hijacking, Cross-Site Scripting (XSS), and SQL injections.Ī reliable and good WAF protection tool will thus have the potential to provide an effective solution ideal for detecting the threats by studying incoming HTTP requests even before they reach the server.

Furthermore, they only permit the port that sends and receives requested web pages from an HTTP server to be closed or open. The standard firewalls lack the potential to detect attacks in web applications as they do not understand Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) which takes place at layer 7 of the OSI model. All these methods are effective at blocking bad 元-L4 traffic at the perimeter on the lower end (元-L4) of the Open Systems Interconnection (OSI) model. Some of the conventional security methods include intrusion detection systems (IDS), intrusion prevention systems (IPS), and network firewalls. Web application firewalls and network firewalls are complementary and can work together. Standard firewalls protect the flow of information between servers whereas a web application firewall (WAF) is capable of filtering traffic for a specific web application.

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