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Application (Layer 7) DDoS protection

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Azure WAF has several defense mechanisms that can help to prevent distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks. The DDoS attacks can target at both network layer (L3/L4) or application layer (L7). Azure DDoS protects customer against large network layer volumetric attacks. Azure WAF operating at layer 7 protects web applications against L7 DDoS attacks such as HTTP Floods. These defenses can prevent attackers from reaching your application and affect your application's availability and performance.

How can you protect your services?

These attacks can be mitigated by adding Web Application Firewall (WAF) or placing DDoS in front of the service to filter out bad requests. Azure offers WAF running at network edge with Azure Front Door and in data centers with Application Gateway. These steps are a generalized list and need to be adjusted to fit your application requirements service.

  • Deploy Azure Web Application Firewall (WAF) with Azure Front Door Premium or Application Gateway WAF v2 SKU to protect against L7 application layer attacks.
  • Scale up your origin instance count so that there's sufficient spare capacity.
  • Enable Azure DDoS Protection on the origin public IPs to protect your public IPs against layer 3(L3) and layer 4(L4) DDoS attacks. Azure’s DDoS offerings can automatically protect most sites from L3 and L4 volumetric attacks that send large numbers of packets towards a website. Azure also offers infrastructure level protection to all sites hosted on Azure by default.

Azure WAF with Azure Front Door

Azure WAF has many features that can be used to mitigate many different types of attacks, like HTTP floods, Cache bypass, attacks launched by botnets.

  • Use bot protection managed rule set to protect against known bad bots. For more information, see Configuring bot protection.

  • Apply rate limits to prevent IP addresses from calling your service too frequently. For more information, see Rate limiting.

  • Block IP addresses, and ranges that you identify as malicious. For more information, see IP restrictions.

  • Block or redirect to a static web page any traffic from outside a defined geographic region, or within a defined region that doesn't fit the application traffic pattern. For more information, see Geo-filtering.

  • Create custom WAF rules to automatically block and rate limit HTTP or HTTPS attacks that have known signatures. Signature such as a specific user-agent, or a specific traffic pattern including headers, cookies, query string parameters or a combination of multiple signatures.

Beyond WAF, Azure Front Door also offers default Azure Infrastructure DDoS protection to protect against L3/4 DDoS attacks. Enabling caching on Azure Front Door can help absorb sudden peak traffic volume at the edge and protect backend origins from attack as well.

For more information on features and DDoS protection on Azure Front Door, see DDoS protection on Azure Front Door.

Azure WAF with Azure Application Gateway

We recommend using Application Gateway WAF v2 SKU that comes with the latest features, including L7 DDoS mitigation features, to defend against L7 DDoS attacks.

Application Gateway WAF SKUs can be used to mitigate many L7 DDoS attacks:

  • Set your Application Gateway to auto scale up and not enforce number of max instances.

  • Use bot protection managed rule set provides protection against known bad bots. For more information, see Configuring bot protection.

  • Apply rate limits to prevent IP addresses from calling your service too frequently. For more information, see Configuring Rate limiting custom rules.

  • Block IP addresses, and ranges that you identify as malicious. For more information, see examples at Create and use v2 custom rules.

  • Block or redirect to a static web page any traffic from outside a defined geographic region, or within a defined region that doesn't fit the application traffic pattern. For more information, see examples at Create and use v2 custom rules.

  • Create custom WAF rules to automatically block and rate limit HTTP or HTTPS attacks that have known signatures. Signatures such as a specific user-agent, or a specific traffic pattern including headers, cookies, query string parameters or a combination of multiple signatures.

Other considerations

  • Lock down access to public IPs on origin and restrict inbound traffic to only allow traffic from Azure Front Door or Application Gateway to origin. Refer to the guidance on Azure Front Door. Application Gateways are deployed in a virtual network, ensure there isn't any publicly exposed IPs.

  • Switch WAF policy to the prevention mode. Deploying the policy in detection mode operates in the log only and doesn't block traffic. After verifying and testing your WAF policy with production traffic and fine tuning to reduce any false positives, you should turn policy to Prevention mode (block/defend mode).

  • Monitor traffic using Azure WAF logs for any anomalies. You can create custom rules to block any offending traffic – suspected IPs sending unusually high number of requests, unusual user-agent string, anomalous query string patterns etc.

  • You can bypass the WAF for known legitimate traffic by creating Match Custom Rules with the action of Allow to reduce false positive. These rules should be configured with a high priority (lower numeric value) than other block and rate limit rules.

  • At a minimum, you should have a rate limit rule that blocks high rate of requests from any single IP address. For example, you can configure a rate limit rule to not allow any single Client IP address to send more than XXX traffic per window to your site. Azure WAF supports two windows for tracking requests, 1 and 5 minutes. It's recommended to use the 5-minute window for better mitigation of HTTP Flood attacks. This rule should be the lowest priority rule (priority is ordered with 1 being the highest priority), so that more specific Rate Limit rules or Match rules can be created to match before this rule. If you are using Application Gateway WAF v2, you can make use of additional rate limiting configurations to track and block clients by methods other than Client IP. More information on Rate Limits on Application Gateway waf can be found at Rate limiting overview.

    The following Log Analytics query can be helpful in determining the threshold you should use for the above rule. For a similar query but with Application Gateway, replace "FrontdoorAccessLog" with "ApplicationGatewayAccessLog".

    AzureDiagnostics
| where Category == "FrontdoorAccessLog"
| summarize count() by bin(TimeGenerated, 5m), clientIp_s
| summarize max(count_), percentile(count_, 99), percentile(count_, 95)

  • Managed rules while not directly targeted for defenses against DDoS attacks provide protection against other common attacks. For more information, see Managed rules (Azure Front Door) or Managed rules (Application Gateway) to learn more about various attack types these rules can help protect against.

WAF log analysis

You can analyze WAF logs in Log Analytics with the following query.

Azure Front Door

AzureDiagnostics
| where Category == "FrontdoorWebApplicationFirewallLog"

For more information, see Azure WAF with Azure Front Door.

Azure Application Gateway

AzureDiagnostics
| where Category == "ApplicationGatewayFirewallLog"

For more information, see Azure WAF with Azure Application Gateway.

Next steps