We’ve been covering a heck of a lot of territory in our series on Building a Web Application Security Program (see Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, and Part 6). So far we’ve covered secure development and secure deployment, now it’s time to move on to secure operations. This is the point where the application moves out of development and testing and into production.

Keep in mind that much of what we’ve talked about until now is still in full effect- just because you have a production system doesn’t mean you throw away all your other tools and processes. Updates still need to go through secure development, systems and applications are still subject to vulnerability assessments and penetration testing (although you need to use a different process when testing live applications vs. staging), and configuration management and ongoing secure management are more important than ever before.

In the secure operations phase we add two new technology categories to support two additional processes- Web Application Firewalls (WAF) for shielding from certain types of attacks, and monitoring at the application and database levels to support auditing and security alerting.

Before we dig in, we also want to thank everyone who has been commenting on this series as we post it- the feedback is invaluable, and we’re going to make sure everyone is credited once we put it into whitepaper format.

Web Application Firewalls (WAF)

The role of a web application firewall is to sit in front of or next to a web application, monitoring application activity, and alerting or blocking on policy violations. Thus it potentially serves two functions- as a detective control for monitoring web activity, and as a preventative control for blocking activity.

A web application firewall is a firewall specifically built to watch HTTP requests and block those that are malicious or don’t comply with specific rules. The intention is to catch SQL injection, Cross Site Scripting (XSS), directory traversal, and various HTTP abuses, as well as authorization, request forgeries, and other attempts to alter web application behavior. The WAF rules and policies are effectively consistency checks, for both the HTTP protocol and application functionality. WAFs can alert or block activity based on general attack signatures (such as a known SQL injection attack for a particular database), or application-specific signatures for the web application being protected.

WAF products examine inbound and outbound HTTP requests, compare these with the firewall rules, and create alerts for conditions of concern. Finally, the WAF selects a disposition for the traffic: 1) let it pass, 2) let it pass but audit, 3) block the transaction, or 4) reset the connection.

WAFs typically network appliances. They are normally placed in-line as a filter for the application (proxy mode); or ‘out-of-band’, receiving traffic from a mirror or SPAN port. In the former scenario, all inbound and outbound requests are intercepted and inspected prior to the web server receiving the request or user receiving the response, reducing load on the web application. For SSL traffic, inline WAFs also need to proxy the SSL connection from the browser so it can decrypt and inspect traffic before it reaches the web server, or after it leaves the web server for responses. In out-of-band mode, there are additional techniques to monitor the encrypted connections by placing a copy of the server certificate on the WAF, or positioning it behind an SSL concentrator. Some vendors also provide WAF capabilities via plug-ins for specific platforms, rather than through external devices.

The effectiveness of any WAF is limited by the quality of the policies it is configured to enforce. Policies are important not merely to ability to recognize and stop known/specific attacks, but also for flexibly dealing with ambiguous and unknown threat types, while keeping false positives manageable and without preventing normal transaction processing. The complexity of the web application, combined with the need for continuous policy updates, and the wide variety of deployment options to accommodate, pose a complex set of challenges for any WAF vendor. Simply dropping a WAF in front of your application and turning on all the default rules in blocking mode is a recipe for disaster. There is no way for black box to effectively understand all the intricacies of a custom application, and customization and tuning are essential for keeping false positives and negatives under control.

When deployed in monitoring mode, the WAF is used in a manner similar to an intrusion detection system (IDS). It’s set to monitor activity and generate alerts based on policy violations. This is how you’ll typically want to initially deploy the WAF, even if you plan on blocking activity later. It gives you an opportunity to tune the system and better understand application activity before you start trying to block connections. An advantage of monitoring mode is that you can watch for a wider range of potential attacks without worrying that false positives will result in inappropriate blocking. The disadvantages are 1) your incident handlers will spend more time dealing with these incidents and false positives, and 2) bad activity won’t be blocked immediately.

In blocking/enforcement mode, the WAF will break connections by dropping them (proxy mode) or sending TCP reset packets (out of band mode) to reset the connection. The WAF can then ban the originating IP, permanently or temporarily, to stop additional attacks from that origin. Blocking mode is most effective when deployed as part of a “shield then patch” strategy to block known vulnerabilities in your application.

When a vulnerability is discovered in your application, you build a specific signature to block attacks on it and deploy that to the WAF (the “shield”). This protects your application as you go back and fix the vulnerable code, or wait for an update from your software provider (the “patch”). The shield then patch strategy greatly reduces potential false positives that interfere with application use and improves performance, but is only possible when you have adequate processes to detect and evaluate these vulnerabilities.

You can combine both approaches by deploying a larger signature set in monitoring mode, but only enabling a few specific policies in blocking mode.

Given these challenges, satisfaction with WAF products varies widely among security professionals who use them. While WAFs are effective against known threats, they are less capable of discovering new issues or handling questionable use cases. Some WAF products are addressing these issues by linking web application firewalls more tightly to the vulnerability assessment process and tools, as we’ll discuss in a moment.

Monitoring

Monitoring is primarily used for discovery, both of how an application is used by real users, and also for how it can be misused. The fundamental value of monitoring is to learn what you do not already know- this is important not only for setting up a WAF, but also for tune an application security strategy. Although WAFs provide some level of application activity monitoring, there are three additional ways to monitor web applications, each with a different perspective on application activity:

• Network Monitoring: Monitoring network activity between the user/Internet and the web server. This category includes web application firewalls, intrusion detection systems, packet sniffers, and other external tools. While generic network security and sniffing tools can capture all network traffic, they have much less capability to place it in context and translate network activity into application transactions. Simply viewing HTTP traffic is often insufficient for understanding what users are attempting in an application- this is where interpretation is required. If a solution includes web application specific analysis and the ability to (potentially) audit all web activity, we call it Web Application Monitoring (WAM). While network monitoring is easy to implement and doesn’t require application changes, it can only monitor what’s going into and coming out of the application. This may be useful for detecting traditional attacks against the application stack, but much less useful than seeing traffic fully correlated to higher-level transactions.
• Application Auditing/Logging: Collection and analysis of application logs and internal activity. Both custom and off-the-shelf applications often include internal auditing capabilities, but there is tremendous variation in what’s captured and how it’s formatted and stored. While you gain insight into what’s actually occurring in the application, not all applications log equally (or at all)- you are limited to whatever the programmers decided to track. For major enterprise applications, such as SAP, we’ve seen third party tools that either add additional monitoring or can interpret native audits. Log management and SIEM tools can also be used to collect and interpret (to a more limited degree) application activity when audit logs are generated.
• Database Activity Monitoring: DAM tools use a variety of methods to (potentially) record all database transactions and generate alerts on specific policy violations. By monitoring activity between the application and the database, DAM can provide a more precise examination of data elements, and awareness of multi-step transactions which directly correspond to business functions. Some DAM tools have specific plug ins for major application types (e.g., SAP & PeopleSoft) to translate database transactions into application activity. Since the vast majority of web applications run off databases, this is an effective point to track activity and look for policy violations. A full discussion of DAM is beyond the scope of this post, but more information is available in our DAM whitepaper.

WAF can be used for monitoring, but these alternative tools offer a wider range of activity collection, which helps to detect probing which may not be obvious from HTTP requests alone. The focus of web application monitoring is to examine behavior across data sources and provide analysis, recording activity trails and alerting on suspicious events, whereas WAFs are more focused on detection and blocking of known threats. There are significant differences between WAMs and WAFs in areas such as activity storage, aggregation of data from multiple sources, and examination of the collected data, so choosing the best tool depends specifics of the requirement. We must point out that web application monitoring products are not fully mature, and the handful of available products are early in the product evolution cycle.

WAF + VA

Several vendors have begun providing a hybrid model that combines web application vulnerability assessment with a web application firewall. As mentioned earlier, one of the difficulties with a shield then patch strategy is detecting vulnerabilities and building the WAF signatures to defend them. Coupling assessment tools or services with WAFs by feeding the assessment results to the firewall, and having the firewall adjust its policy set accordingly, can makes the firewall more effective. The intention is to fill the gap between exploits discovery/announcement and deployment of tested patches in the application, by instructing the WAF to block access to the particular weakness. In this model the assessment determines that there is a vulnerability and feeds the information to the WAF. The assessment policy contains WAF instructions on what to look for and how to respond. The WAF then dynamically incorporates the policy and protects the application.

This is the last post in this series where we discuss your options at different stages of the application lifecycle. Our next post will discuss which options you should consider, and how to balance your resource expenditures into an overall program.