NGINX WAF Certified in the Google Cloud Security Partner Ecosystem

Original: https://www.nginx.com/blog/nginx-waf-gcp-security-partner/

We are pleased to announce that the NGINX Web Application Firewall (WAF) is now part of the Google Cloud Security Partner Ecosystem. The NGINX WAF has been validated by both NGINX, Inc. and Google as a solution for protecting Google Cloud Platform (GCP) applications from Layer 7 attacks, such as SQL injection (SQLi) and remote code execution (RCE).

“We’re proud to be partnering with Google to bring the advanced capabilities of NGINX Plus to the Google Cloud Platform,” said Paul Oh, head of Business Development at NGINX. “NGINX was one of the inaugural members in the Google Cloud Marketplace and we look forward to continuing to collaborate on improving our capabilities for mutual customers.”

What Is the NGINX WAF?

The NGINX WAF is our build of the well‑known and respected ModSecurity software and loads directly into NGINX Open Source and NGINX Plus as a dynamic module. Originally a plug‑in for the Apache HTTP Server, ModSecurity was rewritten in version 3.0 to work natively with NGINX.

A WAF is a widely used solution for improving web application security. The NGINX WAF is specialized to focus on HTTP traffic. When an HTTP request is made, the NGINX WAF inspects all parts of the request for any malicious content or anomalies in the traffic. If the packet is deemed malicious it can be blocked, logged, or both, depending on configuration.

NGINX WAF diagram
The NGINX WAF protects applications from Layer 7 attacks

The NGINX WAF uses a database of “rules” that define malicious behaviors. It supports the OWASP ModSecurity Core Rule Set (CRS), the most widely used rule set for ModSecurity. The OWASP CRS is community‑maintained and has been tuned through wide exposure to block a broad range of attacks with very few false positives.

The OWASP CRS blocks many new web application vulnerabilities out of the gate. For example, the recent Drupalgeddon 2 vulnerability (CVE-2018-7600) is correctly identified and blocked as an RCE vulnerability by the NGINX WAF with the CRS. As of June 2018, there are more than 115,000 websites still vulnerable to Drupalgeddon 2.

For attacks that are not blocked by the CRS, ModSecurity has a flexible rules language that is based on standard Perl Compatible Regular Expressions (PCRE) syntax, the same syntax NGINX uses. ModSecurity rules can be used to virtually patch vulnerabilities, which protects applications until a proper patch can be deployed (for an example, see our blog).

How Do I Get Started?

To get started using the NGINX WAF in GCP, please contact our sales team.

To learn more about using NGINX Plus on GCP, please see our NGINX and GCP partner page.

Learn More

Retrieved by Nick Shadrin from nginx.com website.