The Barracuda Web Application Firewall provides complete protection of Web applications and is designed to enforce policies for both internal and external data security standards, such as Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS). At the same time the Barracuda Web Application Firewall 460 and higher models feature a comprehensive set of application delivery capabilities designed to improve the performance, scalability and manageability of today’s most demanding data center infrastructures.
Powerful, Complete Solution
The Barracuda Web Application Firewall protects Web applications and Web services from malicious attacks, and can also increase the performance and scalability of these applications. The Barracuda Web Application Firewall offers every capability needed to deliver, secure and manage enterprise Web applications from a single appliance through an intuitive, real-time user interface.
- Single point of protection for inbound and outbound traffic for all Web applications
- Protects Web sites and Web applications against application layer attacks
- Delivers best practices security right out of the box
- Monitors traffic and provides reports about attackers and attack attempts
- Protection against common attacks
- Outbound data theft protection
- Web site cloaking
- Granular policies
- Secure HTTP traffic
- SSL Offloading
- SSL Acceleration
- Load Balancing
Comprehensive Web Site Protection
Many applications are vulnerable to such attacks because application developers do not consistently employ secure coding practices. Barracuda Web Application Firewall is designed to combat all attack types that have been categorized as significant threats, including:
- Cross Site Scripting (XSS)
- SQL injection flaws
- OS command injections
- Site reconnaissance
- Session hijacking
- Application denial of service
- Malicious probes/crawlers
- Cookie/session tampering
- Path traversal
- Information leakage
A Single Solution to a Multifaceted Problem
Online Web-based applications are increasingly at risk from professional hackers who target such applications in order to commit data theft or fraud. Being compromised can damage an enterprise's reputation, result in loss of customers and impact the organization's bottom line.
In addition, companies that transact online are faced with a host of growing industry regulations such as the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS), which mandates that all enterprise and Web applications handling credit card and account information must undergo an extensive and costly audit of custom application code. The alternative to satisfy PCI DSS compliance is simply installing a Web application firewall.
The combination of these factors along with banking industry PCI DSS compliance concerns, creates demand for a more technologically and cost-effective risk protection solution for online Web applications.
Backed by the worldwide leader in email and Web security appliances, the Barracuda Web Application Firewall will continue to dominate the market by breaking technology barriers.
Traditionally, security has been considered a network issue, where system administrators lock down host computers through a network firewall. While a typical network firewall can help restrict traffic to HTTP and HTTPS, this traffic can contain command exploits leveraging vulnerabilities in the Web application itself that can result in data leakage, site defacement and other attacks by hackers that compromise both the privacy and integrity of vital data. Businesses of all sizes that operate their own Web applications should ensure that their Web sites are protected against application vulnerabilities.
The Barracuda Web Application Firewall provides complete protection of Web applications and is designed to enforce policies for both internal and external data security standards, such as Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS). At the same time the Barracuda Web Application Firewall 460 and higher models feature a comprehensive set of application delivery capabilities designed to improve the performance, scalability and manageability of today's most demanding data center infrastructures.
Comprehensive Web Site Protection
The Barracuda Web Application Firewall proxies all of your Web site traffic, providing complete protection in front of your Web sites. Capabilities include:
HTTP protocol compliance
At a basic level, the Barracuda Web Application Firewall verifies that all inbound requests comply with the HTTP specification. For example, inbound requests with more than one Content-Length header are typically the basis of HTTP request smuggling attacks; therefore they are illegal according to the HTTP specification and are blocked automatically.
Protection against common, high-visibility attacks. Hackers can take advantage of vulnerabilities in your online Web forms to attack your applications. The Barracuda Web Application Firewall protects your Web applications against SQL injections, OS command injections and cross-site scripting attacks.
Protection against attacks based on session state. The Barracuda Web Application Firewall protects your Web applications against any attacks based on session state, such as forms tampering or cookie tampering.
Outbound data theft protection. In addition to inspecting the request traffic, the Barracuda Web Application Firewall also inspects all outbound packets for any data pattern expressible as a UNIX-style regular expression. Built-in policies protect all major credit cards and U.S. Social Security number patterns and new data patterns can be added at any time. Inspection for outbound leakage of these patterns can be applied to security policy on-the-fly.
Web site cloaking. To prevent hackers from doing reconnaissance on your Web infrastructure, the Barracuda Web Application Firewall automatically strips identifying banners of Web server software and version numbers out of all transactions.
Anti-crawling. While some Web crawlers, such as search engines are often desirable, you may wish to prevent all other users from downloading your entire site. The Barracuda Web Application Firewall can easily identify and allow legitimate crawlers while blocking more malicious ones.
Fine-grained control. The Barracuda Web Application Firewall features automatic fine-grain rules creation based on both HTTP requests and responses down to the level of individual HTML elements.
Application denial of service (DoS) protection. By validating input limits for online form fields, Web applications and sites are protected against the SQL injections, OS command injections or form field-based attacks. Fine-grain control on all points prevents hackers from instigating these common attacks.
Application Access Control
The Barracuda Web Application Firewall implements a single point for policy enforcement and control, which includes authentication to ensure that users are known, access control policy for resources and protection against data leakage. Capabilities include:
PKI support. By providing a full PKI infrastructure, the Barracuda Web Application Firewall can act as a Certificate Authority, including participating in a certificate trust chain.
Cookie tampering. The Barracuda Web Application Firewall fully terminates and proxies every connection to insulate each unique user session from exposure and can stamp or encrypt the session cookies. Also included to prevent cookie tampering is the ability to ensure that all hidden or read-only form fields are not changed by the user.
Application Delivery and Acceleration
In addition to the comprehensive security benefits of the Barracuda Web Application Firewall, there are also additional operational capabilities available in the Barracuda Web Application Firewall. Capabilities include:
SSL offloading.The Barracuda Web Application Firewall includes SSL offloading, streamlining the encryption and decryption of SSL traffic to quickly process secure online transactions without additional burden on any servers.
SSL acceleration. The Barracuda Web Application Firewall includes hardware-based SSL acceleration, offloading back-end servers from the computational burdens of encrypting and decrypting secure Web traffic.
Load balancing. The Barracuda Web Application Firewall includes integrated load balancing capabilities to distribute traffic among multiple back-end servers. It supports both Layer 4 and Layer 7 cookie persistence and includes support for Layer 7 content switching based on URL pattern, parameter or HTTP header fields.
High Availability. When inline in Bridge-path, the Ethernet Hard Bypass ensures reliable application delivery even with a single Barracuda Web Application Firewall. For Web applications with stringent security requirements, the Barracuda Web Application Firewall may be installed in a redundant pair configuration, providing real-time application state replication so that security and user sessions will not be compromised during a failover event.
Logging, Monitoring and Reporting
The Barracuda Web Application Firewall features advanced capabilities to provide immediate feedback to the operations team that deploy, manage and secure mission critical applications. Capabilities include:
Comprehensive logging. The Barracuda Web Application Firewall maintains a rich set of logs on the appliance, including system activity, Web Firewall activity, Web services activity, network firewall activity and traditional Web logs.
PCI Reports. The Barracuda Web Application Firewall provides an easy-to-read snapshot of common application attacks, critical for securing credit card important and providing compliance to PCI DSS requirements.
Syslog support. The Barracuda Web Application Firewall forwards logs to a syslog server for centralized and persistent storage or analysis by a third party tool.
Web Application Firewall Administration
Configuration and Policy Administration
Configuration of the Barracuda Web Application Firewall is accomplished through a secure Web-based interface, featuring a comprehensive online help system.
Initial application definition is made simple through comprehensive default security policies that also allow the administrator to specify more fine-grain rules. Features such as automatic rule creation from log entries enable administrators to easily maintain security policies even as applications change.
Reporting
The Barracuda Web Application Firewall's administrative tools feature statistical reporting that allow you to visualize both overall Web traffic levels as well as the levels of traffic filtered for either policy or security reasons.
The Barracuda Web Application Firewall basic status page provides a quick snapshot of statistics on common attacks, subscription status, performance statistics, as well as hourly and daily attacks and bandwidth usage.
Standard Deployment Configuration
The Barracuda Web Application Firewall is designed to easily fit into any existing data center environment and to rapidly secure and accelerate new and existing Web applications. Barracuda Networks offers the most flexible array of Barracuda Web Application Firewall deployment options, including both Bridge-path and Route-path.
Bridge-path
Bridge-path, the recommended mode of implementation for most customers with existing Web application traffic, enables simple and fast deployment without requiring any IP address changes on either the front- or back-end Web servers or network devices. The bridge is transparent, so no user traffic is disrupted.
Route-path
Route-path provides the highest degree of protection for a Web application infrastructure by acting as a full reverse proxy for all Web application traffic. As a reverse proxy, Route-path allows only predefined traffic that adheres to security policies. Additionally, the reverse proxy controls the only route to the back-end network, so traffic cannot flow to any server unless specifically forwarded by the proxy. This is the most flexible deployment mode because it facilitates the content-based traffic management functions of the Barracuda Web Application Firewall.
One-Armed Proxy Deployment
Deploying the Barracuda Web Application Firewall in the One-Armed Proxy configuration requires the unit to be set up off a switch only from the WAN port. This configuration creates an additional route for traffic to reach the servers without disturbing the natural flow through the network. Only the traffic that needs to be monitored or secured is routed via the Barracuda Web Application Firewall. One-Armed Proxy as a deployment option is utilized during the initial phases when the administrators want to validate the solution without having to change network settings. Another scenario to use the One-Armed Proxy deployment is to utilize the load balancing feature of the appliance for HTTP/HTTPS traffic, while letting SMTP and other traffic go directly to the server.
Fault Tolerant Barracuda Web Application Firewall Environment
Some organizations may need only a single Barracuda Web Application Firewall. When inline in Bridge-path mode, the Barracuda Web Application Firewall’s Ethernet Hard Bypass ensures reliable application delivery. For Web applications with stringent security requirements, the Barracuda Web Application Firewall may be installed in a redundant pair configuration, providing real-time application state replication so that security and user sessions will not be compromised during a failover event.
Web Application Firewall PCI DSS Compliance
The Barracuda Web Application Firewall helps organizations of all types that store, process and/or transmit credit card numbers, comply with the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) requirements. In response to increased identity theft incidents and security breaches, major credit card companies collaborated in Sept. 2006 to create the 12 procedural and system requirements, commonly known as PCI DSS version 1.1, to standardize how to store and access Primary Account Number (PAN) information.
Most immediate for today's merchants and organizations is Section 6.6 of the PCI DSS compliance deadline on June 30, 2008, addressing the development and maintenance of secure systems and applications. Section 6.6 mandates all enterprise and Web applications handling credit card and account information must undergo an extensive audit of all custom application code that can be time consuming, labor intensive and a costly process to visit and revisit with each change to the application code. The alternative to satisfy PCI DSS Section 6.6 compliance is simply installing a Web application firewall.
Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) Requirements
The 12 PCI DSS requirements are organized into 6 main categories. To be fully compliant, an organization must satisfy all 12 requirements.
- Maintain a Secure Network: Requirements 1 and 2
- Install and maintain a firewall configuration to protect cardholder data
- Do not use vendor-supplied defaults for system passwords and other security parameters
- Protect Cardholder Data: Requirements 3 and 4
- Protect stored cardholder data
- Encrypt transmission of cardholder data across open, public networks
- Maintain a Vulnerability Management Program: Requirements 5 and 6
- Use and regularly update anti-virus software
- Develop and maintain secure systems and applications
- Implement Strong Access Controls: Requirements 7, 8, and 9
- Restrict access to cardholder data by business need-to-know
- Assign a unique ID to each person with computer access
- Restrict physical access to cardholder data
- Regularly Monitor and Test Networks: Requirements 10 and 11
- Track and monitor all access to network resources and cardholder data
- Regularly test security systems and processes
- Maintain an Information Security Policy: Requirement 12
- Maintain a policy that addresses information security
Source: PCI Security Standards version 1.1 - http://www.PCISecurityStandards.org.
Barracuda Networks Enables PCI DSS Compliance
The Barracuda Web Application Firewall is designed as an easy and cost-effective solution to achieve PCI DSS compliance. In addition to satisfying the time-sensitive need to install a Web application firewall into your network for PCI DSS Section 6.6 compliance, the Barracuda Web Application Firewall further ensures PCI DSS compliance with a host of other advanced technologies.
The Barracuda Web Application Firewall enables PCI DSS compliance across major requirements:
| 1 - Install a Firewall |
Acts as a Web application firewall |
| 3 - Protect data |
Proxies Web traffic and insulates Web servers from direct
access by attackers |
| 4 - Encryption |
Provides easy SSL encryption even if the application or
server does not enable SSL |
| 6 - Protect Against Vulnerabilities |
Blocks known and zero-day attacks as well as the
industry-accepted top 10 Web application vulnerabilities for custom
development, legacy and third-party applications |
| 7 - Restrict Access |
Provides role-based administration to security policies |
| 10 - Track and Monitor Access |
Logs and reports application access and security violations |
PCI DSS section 6.5 is perhaps the most significant set of detailed requirements as it addresses application vulnerability, including coding guidelines, such as those outlined by Open Web Application Security Project (OWASP). The Barracuda Web Application Firewall directly addresses each of the requirements in section 6.5.
| 6.5.1 Unvalidated input (i.e., hidden field manipulation) |
Validates incoming and outgoing session content against legitimate application behavior and usage |
| 6.5.2 Broken access control (i.e., malicious use of user IDs) |
Prevents cookie tampering and corruption of an application's access control system |
| 6.5.3 Broken authentication and session management (i.e. cookie tampering, session hijacking) |
Automatically encrypts session cookies and assigns unique session-IDs to ensure secure user sessions |
| 6.5.4 Cross-site scripting (XSS) attacks |
Inspects and verifies user input and incoming requests for any malicious code before forwarding it to backend servers |
| 6.5.5 Buffer overflows |
Detects and prevents attempts via the header or input fields to exceed memory capacity |
| 6.5.6 Injection flaws (i.e., SQL injection) |
Validates legitimacy of all Web requests and code accessing backend systems |
| 6.5.7 Improper error handling |
Cloaks Web application infrastructure from hackers attempting to expose vulnerabilities in error response and other messages |
| 6.5.8 Insecure storage |
Filters and intercepts outbound traffic to prevent transmission of sensitive information, such as passwords, credit card numbers, account records or proprietary information |
| 6.5.9 Application Denial of service (DoS) |
Slows down access requests to the Web site if a violation is detected, preventing application DoS attacks |
| 6.5.10 Insecure configuration management |
Proxies all inbound and outbound Web traffic to neutralize any configuration vulnerabilities |
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Basic -> Status
Displays the current status of the appliance, including the attack distribution and traffic statistics for the configured Web sites.
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Basic -> Services
Provides configuration of Web sites and enables default protection.
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Basic -> Default Security
Enables the configuration of the default security policy.
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Basic -> IP Configuration
Controls the settings for WAN, LAN and Management IP configuration. Using this screen, the Barracuda Web Application Firewall can be configured in bridge or proxy mode.
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Basic -> Web Firewall Logs
Tracks attacks against the Web sites and actions taken by the Barracuda Web Application Firewall.
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Security Policies -> Cookie Security
Enables policies to protect an application’s cookies from theft or tampering.
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Security Policies -> URL Protection
Sets policies for scanning URLs to enforce only valid traffic passes through to the Web servers.
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Security Policies -> Parameter Protection
Sets acceptable parameters to ensure values are validated.
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Security Policies -> Cloaking
Controls suppression of server banners and errors to ensure no sensitive information is available in response messages.
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Security Policies -> Data Theft Protection
Protects sensitive information such as credit card numbers and social security numbers from information leakage.
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Websites -> Web Site Profiles
Builds application structure to include domains, URLs, Form parameters and utilizes the structure to enforce security policy.
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Access Control -> Authentication Services
Integrates with authentication services such as LDAP, RADIUS, CA SiteMinder and RSA SecurID to provide access control for Web applications
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Advanced -> Energize Updates
Sets intervals to download attack and security definitions.
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Advanced -> Admin Access Controls
Controls access to system components by restricting privileges based on administrative roles.
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Advanced -> Threat Control Manager
Imports assessment report from Vulnerability Scanners to recommend and configure rules that would block the reported vulnerabilities.
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