[jojo1]

So, you disagree with me. That's perfectly fine. But why are you down voting me for not sharing your position?

I've been working a long time in the "security industry". Believe me, it has reasons why I call products like WAFs snake oil...

[modoc]

I do disagree with you.

WAFs aren't perfect, no security product is. They do allow you to implement protection against many types of common attacks against your website. This is useful if your site runs applications that you don't have the ability to fix XSS/Injection/etc... issues on (you don't own the code, you don't have resources to do it, etc...). This is actually pretty important as most websites out there run old and/or closed source and/or 3rd party code and/or don't have internal resources to identify and fix every vulnerability 100% of the time. A well tuned WAF provides a decent layer of protection. They also allow you you solve PCI DSS 1.2 Req #6.6 without doing pen testing/vuln testing after every single code change you release.

[lylejohnson]

Perhaps if you had shared some of those reasons you wouldn't have been downvoted.

[thehigherlife]

I think it has a lot to do with making an incredulous statement without providing some evidence, or discussion as to why you think "WAFs are snake oil".

[wmf]

OK, so actually state your reason. You're being downvoted because we can't read your mind.

[Locke1689]

WAFs are usually viewed as relatively useless as they waste time on dumb attacks (specifically blacklisting) that harms more than it helps. Only the stupidest attacks can be caught using WAFs and they are more likely to block legitimate traffic than to help with security.

The idea is similar to using blacklists in filter functions in XSS or SQL protection mechanisms. In theory they could block all malicious but in practice they're poorly written and poorly configured crap that act as more security theatre than anything else. The proper approach is to use context-sensitive whitelists for all client input, not add on layers of what is essentially protocol grep.

[seanp2k]

And do you really think that's a feasible expectation for the typical shared hosting client -- a business owner with little tech experience who doesn't have the money to hire an actual good developer? The person who doesn't even know that they don't know good developers from bad developers?

>"The proper approach is to use context-sensitive whitelists for all client input, not add on layers of what is essentially protocol grep." It's regex for HTTP requests / responses. Literally, that's all it does.

>"WAFs are usually viewed as relatively useless as they waste time on dumb attacks (specifically blacklisting) that harms more than it helps. " By who? References? As I mentioned above, we use WAFs and they help a lot with stupid attacks, because stupid attacks are what most of the attacks are; automated attack crap running on botnets to put up phishing pages on easy targets.

[jojo1]

Ok, than go on. :-)

[seanp2k]

Reasons like....what, exactly? We're a hosting company and we use them on most servers. They're not perfect, but they prevent probably about 95% of the automated attacks that we see come through. If it's enough protection to make them move on to something easier, it's better than nothing. I agree with you that they're pretty easy to bypass, and shame on companies like Barracuda Networks who sell Supermicro servers with CentOS and mod_security and a proxy set up with a fancy web interface and call that a "web application firewall", but they ARE better than nothing.