Functions

WAF helps you protect services from various web security risks. The following table lists the functions of WAF.

Function		Description
Service configuration	Protection for IP addresses and domain names (wildcard, top-level, and second-level domain names)	When adding a website to WAF, you can select Cloud Mode - CNAME, Cloud Mode - Load balancer, or Dedicated Mode. Before you start, get familiar with their differences: Cloud Mode - CNAME: protects your web applications that have domain name and are deployed on any clouds or in on-premises data centers. Cloud Mode - Load balancer: protects your web applications that are deployed on Huawei Cloud and accessible over domain names or IP addresses (public or private IP addresses). Dedicated Mode: protects your web applications that are deployed on Huawei Cloud and accessible over domain names or IP addresses (public or private IP addresses).
	HTTP/HTTPS service protection	WAF can protect HTTP and HTTPS traffic for a website.
	WebSocket/WebSockets	WAF can check WebSocket and WebSockets requests, which is enabled by default.
	Non-standard port protection	In addition to standard ports 80 and 443, WAF also supports non-standard ports.
Web application security protection	Basic Web Protection NOTE: If you set Protective Action to Block, you can use the known attack source function. It means that if WAF blocks malicious requests from a visitor, you can enable this function to let WAF block requests from the same visitor for a period of time.	With an extensive preset reputation database, WAF defends against Open Web Application Security Project (OWASP) top 10 threats, vulnerability exploits, web shells, and other threats. General Check WAF defends against attacks such as SQL injections, XSS, file inclusions, Bash vulnerabilities, remote command execution, directory traversal, sensitive file access, and command/code injections. Web shell detection WAF protects against web shells from upload interface. Precise identification WAF uses built-in semantic analysis engine and regex engine and supports configuring of blacklist/whitelist rules, which reduces false positives. WAF supports anti-escape and automatic restoration of common codes, which improves the capability of recognizing deformation web attacks. WAF can decode the following types of code: url_encode, Unicode, XML, OCT, hexadecimal, HTML escape, and base64 code, case confusion, JavaScript, shell, and PHP concatenation confusion Deep inspection WAF identifies and blocks evasion attacks, such as the ones that use homomorphic character obfuscation, command injection with deformed wildcard characters, UTF7, data URI scheme, and other techniques. Header detection WAF detects all header fields in the requests. Shiro Decryption Check WAF uses AES and Base64 to decrypt the rememberMe field in cookies and checks whether this field is attacked.
	CC attack protection rules	WAF can restrict access to a specific URL on your website based on a unique IP address, cookie, or referer field, mitigating CC attacks.
	Precise protection rules NOTE: If you set Protective Action to Block, you can use the known attack source function. It means that if WAF blocks malicious requests from a visitor, you can enable this function to let WAF block requests from the same visitor for a period of time.	WAF enables you to combine common HTTP fields (such as IP, path, referer, user agent, and params) to configure powerful and precise access control policies. You can configure precision protection rules to protect workloads from hotlinking and block requests with empty fields.
	Blacklist and whitelist rules NOTE: If you set Protective Action to Block, you can use the known attack source function. It means that if WAF blocks malicious requests from a visitor, WAF will proactively block requests from the same visitor for a period of time.	You can configure blacklist and whitelist rules to block, log only, or allow access requests from specified IP addresses.
	Geolocation access control rules	You can customize these rules to allow or block requests from a specific country or region.
	Web tamper protection rules	You can configure these rules to prevent a static web page from being tampered with.
	Website anti-crawler protection	WAF dynamically analyzes your website service models and accurately identifies more than 700 types of crawler behavior based on data risk control and bot identification systems Feature library Blocks web page crawling with user-defined scanner and crawler rules. This feature improves protection accuracy. JavaScript Identifies and blocks JavaScript crawling with user-defined rules.
	Information leakage prevention rules	You can add two types of information leakage prevention rules. Sensitive information filtering: prevents disclosure of sensitive information (such as ID numbers, phone numbers, and email addresses). Response code interception: blocks the specified HTTP status codes.
	Global protection whitelist rules	This function ignores certain attack detection rules for specific requests.
	Data masking rules	You can configure data masking rules to prevent sensitive data such as passwords from being displayed in event logs.
Advanced settings	PCI DSS/PCI 3DS compliance certification and TLS checks	TLS has three versions (TLS v1.0, TLS v1.1, and TLS v1.2) and eight cipher suites. You can select the one best fits your security needs. WAF supports PCI DSS and PCI 3DS compliance certification check.
	IPv6 protection	WAF can inspect requests that use both IPv4 and IPv6 addresses for the same domain name. For web services that still use the IPv4 protocol stack, WAF supports the NAT64 mechanism. NAT64 is an IPv6 conversion mechanism that enables communication between the IPv6 and IPv4 hosts using network address translation (NAT). WAF can convert an IPv4 source site to an IPv6 website and converts external IPv6 access traffic to internal IPv4 traffic.
	Break Protection	When the 502/504 error requests and pending URL requests reach the thresholds you configure, WAF enables corresponding protection for your website.
	Traffic identifier for a known attack source	WAF allows you to configure traffic identifiers by IP address, session, or user tag to block possibly malicious requests from known attack sources based on IP address, Cookie, or Params.
	Configuring connection timeout	The default timeout for connections from a browser to WAF is 120 seconds. The value varies depending on your browser settings and cannot be changed on the WAF console. The default timeout for connections between WAF and your origin server is 30 seconds. You can customize a timeout on the WAF console as long as you are using a dedicated WAF instance or professional or platinum cloud WAF.
Event management		WAF allows you to view and handle false alarms for blocked or logged events. You can download events data over the past five days. You can use Log Tank Service (LTS) on Huawei Cloud to record all WAF logs, including attack and access logs.
Notifications		This topic describes how to enable notifications for attack logs. Once this function is enabled, WAF sends you SMS or email notifications if an attack is detected. You can configure certificate expiration reminders. When a certificate is about to expire, WAF notifies you by the way you configure, such as email or SMS.
GUI-based security data		WAF provides a GUI-based interface for you to monitor attack information and event logs in real time. Centralized policy configuration On the WAF console, you can configure policies applicable to multiple protected domain names in a centralized manner so that the policies can be quickly delivered and take effect. Traffic and event statistics WAF displays the number of requests, the number and types of security events, and log information in real time.
High flexibility and reliability		WAF can be deployed on multiple clusters in multiple regions based on the load balancing principle. This can prevent single points of failure (SPOFs) and ensure online smooth capacity expansion, maximizing service stability.