Basic or advanced WAF: what to choose for your resource?

Our products include two WAFs (Web Application Firewall): basic and advanced (Next-Gen WAF).

Let’s find out what the difference between these services is and which solution should be chosen for your resource.

What is basic WAF?

Basic WAF is a free firewall that protects against the most common set of threats. It is free and available to all users of our CDN.

Protection

Basic WAF protects against common threats from the OWASP Top 10 list and the Log4Shell vulnerability.

Operation

Attacks are calculated only by a predefined set of signatures.

• All incoming traffic is analyzed in real-time.
• Requests are matched against a specific signature list.
• If a request is detected as malicious, it is blocked.

You can activate the service in your account for one or several resources.

Enabling basic WAF in Gcore control panel

Basic WAF provides good protection against the most common threats. But it will not be able to protect your resource from all attacks. This means there is always a chance of some rare attack or zero-day vulnerability that the shield will not work against.

This type of web protection also has limitations: it does not allow for the configuration of your own rules, and the number of protected requests for a resource is limited.

What is Next-Gen WAF?

Next-Gen WAF is a technological security shield against hacking and unauthorized access to your resource.

Protection

The firewall protects dynamic content against known hacker attacks and provides a secure API connection.

Thanks to the machine learning function, advanced WAF is able to detect and fight against zero-day attacks, which are particularly dangerous for business.

Operation

The firewall’s operation is based on signature and non-signature analysis methods.

Signature-based methods help identify widespread cyberattacks.

Signature-free (statistical) methods of analysis and machine learning detect zero-day attacks that do not have their signature in the database yet.

How advanced WAF works

In addition to blocking attacks, the firewall analyzes your resource, finds possible vulnerabilities, and provides recommendations on fixing them.

The advanced version of WAF has no restrictions on the number of resources and protected requests.

Basic WAF vs Next-Gen WAF

What to choose: basic or advanced version?

Who is basic WAF suitable for?

Basic WAF is a suitable choice for small projects where the number of requests does not exceed 10 million per month. You will be reliably protected from common threats without additional financial investments.

Basic WAF works with all CDN plans. The content delivery network protects resources from DDoS attacks at the network and transport levels by default.

CDN with web protection

Who is Next-Gen WAF suitable for?

For those who consider security to be critically important, basic web protection will not be enough. We recommend using Next-Gen WAF for all e-commerce and fintech applications, telemedicine, and other projects that work with payment, personal and confidential data, as well as resources where the number of requests per month exceeds 10 million.

More about WAF

Summary

1. Basic WAF is one of the free features of our CDN. It protects against the top 10 attacks from the OWASP list and the Log4Shell vulnerability.
2. Next-Gen WAF is a separate paid product. It protects against all known threats, zero-day attacks, and provides a secure API connection.
3. Web protection on CDN is suitable for projects that do not work with confidential data, and the number of requests does not exceed 10 million per month.
4. Next-Gen WAF will be an excellent solution for projects that work with payment, personal and confidential data, and for resources where the number of requests exceeds 10 million per month.

If you still have questions or are not sure which solution to choose, you can have a free consultation. Our experts will help you choose the right option.

Ask an expert