Lightboard Lessons: Introducing the F5 Advanced WAF

The F5 Advanced Web Application Firewall (WAF) provides a powerful set of security features that will keep your Web Applications safe from attack. Many WAFs offer a basic level of protection from attack at the higher layers of the OSI stack, but the F5 Advanced WAF takes things even further and offers some serious security features like Anti Bot Mobile SDK, Credential Stuffing threat feeds, Proactive Bot Defense, and Datasafe to name a few. In this video, John outlines many of the exciting features offered in the F5 Advanced WAF.



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Published May 03, 2018
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BIG-IP
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security
series-devcentral-basics
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  • sunnyman67_1367's avatar
    sunnyman67_1367
    Icon for Nimbostratus rankNimbostratus
    Jan 22, 2019

    Dear John,

     

    So, can we say that by using the latest version of TMOS (either v13.1.1 or v14.x), but with the same BIG-IP Platform, we are involving with the new concept "Advanced WAF"?

     

    Thank you

     

  • ltwagnon's avatar
    ltwagnon
    Ret. Employee
    Jan 22, 2019

    @sunnyman67, great question! the Advanced WAF is actually a separate module that you provision on the BIG-IP. So, if you implement a WAF on your BIG-IP, you either provision the Application Security Manager (ASM) or you provision the Advanced WAF. just because you upgrade to TMOS v13.x or v14.x doesn't automatically mean you are using the Advanced WAF...you would still need to provision it for it to be available and active on your system. i hope this helps!

     

  • sunnyman67_1367's avatar
    sunnyman67_1367
    Icon for Nimbostratus rankNimbostratus
    Jan 23, 2019

    Many thanks John for your clear answer.

     

    The last question is that if we've provisioned ASM, so is it recommended to provision the Advanced-WAF module beside ASM? If YES, so could we conclude that Advanced-WAF is considered as the complementry module for ASM?

     

    In fact, could we say that Advanced-WAF has all the prior features of ASM, in addition of some new specific features (DataSafe, Proactive BOT Defense, ...)?

     

    Many thanks in advance, John

     

  • ltwagnon's avatar
    ltwagnon
    Ret. Employee
    Jan 23, 2019

    @sunnyman67, great questions! the most preferred method is to use the Advanced WAF instead of the ASM. because they are both technically WAFs, you wouldn't need to use them both. the Advanced WAF has all the features of the ASM (as you noted), but it also has more sophisticated features that the ASM does not have. so, i would recommend transitioning from the ASM to the Advanced WAF. i hope this helps!

     

  • sunnyman67_1367's avatar
    sunnyman67_1367
    Icon for Nimbostratus rankNimbostratus
    Jan 24, 2019

    Dear John, Many thanks for your answer.

     

    OK, that's great, I got it. So from now on, we can recommend Advanced-WAF, instead of ASM to our customers.

     

    Because, I've been consulting and instructing most of F5 modules for more than 10 years, therefore, I need to know all the details about the recent changes on F5 products and modules.

     

    However, thanks for your time and kind. If the need arises, I'll ask you for other details.