What Is BIG-IP?
tl;dr - BIG-IP is a collection of hardware platforms and software solutions providing services focused on security, reliability, and performance. F5's BIG-IP is a family of products covering software and hardware designed around application availability, access control, and security solutions. That's right, the BIG-IP name is interchangeable between F5's software and hardware application delivery controller and security products. This is different from BIG-IQ, a suite of management and orchestration tools, and F5 Silverline, F5's SaaS platform. When people refer to BIG-IP this can mean a single software module in BIG-IP's software family or it could mean a hardware chassis sitting in your datacenter. This can sometimes cause a lot of confusion when people say they have question about "BIG-IP" but we'll break it down here to reduce the confusion. BIG-IP Software BIG-IP software products are licensed modules that run on top of F5's Traffic Management Operation System® (TMOS). This custom operating system is an event driven operating system designed specifically to inspect network and application traffic and make real-time decisions based on the configurations you provide. The BIG-IP software can run on hardware or can run in virtualized environments. Virtualized systems provide BIG-IP software functionality where hardware implementations are unavailable, including public clouds and various managed infrastructures where rack space is a critical commodity. BIG-IP Primary Software Modules BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) - Central to F5's full traffic proxy functionality, LTM provides the platform for creating virtual servers, performance, service, protocol, authentication, and security profiles to define and shape your application traffic. Most other modules in the BIG-IP family use LTM as a foundation for enhanced services. BIG-IP DNS - Formerly Global Traffic Manager, BIG-IP DNS provides similar security and load balancing features that LTM offers but at a global/multi-site scale. BIG-IP DNS offers services to distribute and secure DNS traffic advertising your application namespaces. BIG-IP Access Policy Manager (APM) - Provides federation, SSO, application access policies, and secure web tunneling. Allow granular access to your various applications, virtualized desktop environments, or just go full VPN tunnel. Secure Web Gateway Services (SWG) - Paired with APM, SWG enables access policy control for internet usage. You can allow, block, verify and log traffic with APM's access policies allowing flexibility around your acceptable internet and public web application use. You know.... contractors and interns shouldn't use Facebook but you're not going to be responsible why the CFO can't access their cat pics. BIG-IP Application Security Manager (ASM) - This is F5's web application firewall (WAF) solution. Traditional firewalls and layer 3 protection don't understand the complexities of many web applications. ASM allows you to tailor acceptable and expected application behavior on a per application basis . Zero day, DoS, and click fraud all rely on traditional security device's inability to protect unique application needs; ASM fills the gap between traditional firewall and tailored granular application protection. BIG-IP Advanced Firewall Manager (AFM) - AFM is designed to reduce the hardware and extra hops required when ADC's are paired with traditional firewalls. Operating at L3/L4, AFM helps protect traffic destined for your data center. Paired with ASM, you can implement protection services at L3 - L7 for a full ADC and Security solution in one box or virtual environment. BIG-IP Hardware BIG-IP hardware offers several types of purpose-built custom solutions, all designed in-house by our fantastic engineers; no white boxes here. BIG-IP hardware is offered via series releases, each offering improvements for performance and features determined by customer requirements. These may include increased port capacity, traffic throughput, CPU performance, FPGA feature functionality for hardware-based scalability, and virtualization capabilities. There are two primary variations of BIG-IP hardware, single chassis design, or VIPRION modular designs. Each offer unique advantages for internal and collocated infrastructures. Updates in processor architecture, FPGA, and interface performance gains are common so we recommend referring to F5's hardware pagefor more information.
F5 BIG-IP Advanced WAF: OWASP Top 10 Application Security Risks 2021 Compliance Dashboard
Introduction The increase in vulnerabilities and application or API-related attacks exploiting those vulnerabilities has steadily risen. Vulnerabilities like Log4j, and the Log4Shell exploit are spawned and continue to impact many organizations even today. This is where a web application firewall (WAF) solution can protect your apps and APIs. One of the most respected authorities in web application security is the Open Web Application Security Project (OWASP). OWASP is anopen-sourceproject to improve web application security, a coalition of individual contributors and sponsor companies who come together to contribute resources to the project. One of the best-known resources the project delivers is the OWASP Top 10 List. Since web application vulnerability risks change frequently, becoming comparatively more or less critical over time, the OWASP Top 10 List is periodically updated to reflect these changes. The first version of the list was created in 2004, then updated in 2007, 2010, 2013, 2017, and again in 2021 (its most recent version). Figure 1: OWASP Top 10 Web Application Security Risks of 2021 F5 delivers a number of security solutions to help mitigate vulnerabilities in the OWASP categories, and the exploits that are produced from them. To ensure you’re compliant with the OWASP Top 10, F5 BIG-IP Advanced WAF offers a dedicated OWASP compliance dashboard that enables security admins to check how well their policy is set to defend against the OWASP Top 10 and allow organizations to easily reach 100% coverage. The solution makes it simple to modify policies to improve protection from exploit of vulnerabilities in the OWASP Top 10. The compliance dashboard provides a holistic and interactive view that shows the level of mitigation applied by SecOps team against the OWASP Top 10 vulnerability categories. It provides an overall assessment of the policies created and a percentage of how much the policies protect against the various vulnerability categories. The dashboard allows SecOps to increase/adjust the level of protection in real-time based on their needs by deploying pre-defined policies that mitigate the vulnerabilities and their associated exploits. This can be achieved directly from the BIG-IP Advanced WAF’s OWASP Top 10 2021 Dashboard, simplifying protection against known, unknown, and hidden vulnerabilities. Simple, quick, and easy vulnerability and exploit protection, from a single dashboard. Protection Overview Navigating to the OWASP Compliance screen, you can see the list of all the security policies. Clicking on a policy displays the OWASP compliance status for that policy and the coverage for each category. Figure 2: OWASP Compliance screen Expanding a category presents the compliance percentage, a description of that security risk, and the configuration required for full security coverage for this category.Each category is broken down into specific security protections, including positive and negative security controls that can be enabled, disabled, or ignored directly on the dashboard based on your organization’s requirements. Required Attack Signatures: Enforce all the relevant Attack Signatures for this attack type directly from the Dashboard. Required Policy Entities: Add protection configuration components such as Cookies and login Enforcement, data masking, Evasion techniques,detection, methods, URLs, and more relevant configurations for each attack type. In addition to WAF-specific security protections, the OWASP Compliance Dashboard also provides security Best Practices to follow in your processes, such as vulnerability scanning or using trusted repositories. Figure 3: OWASP category A03 Injection – protection and compliance The following video shows how to monitor the compliance coverage of security risks and how to quickly enhance anorganization'ssecurity configuration directly from the dashboard to receive full compliance with protection from OWASP Top 10 vulnerabilities being actively exploited. Conclusion Web applications remain a top target for threats, such as automated attacks, data exfiltration, and vulnerabilities. But F5 can help! Not only can you check off regulatory compliance, but also be able to create reports via the security score relative to deployed policies that addressthe OWASP Top 10, enabling security admins to view each policy’s coverage status, improving protections if necessary, and even allowing security configuration to be performed directly from the dashboard. To learn more, please visit: How to deploy a basic OWASP Top 10 for 2021 compliant declarative WAF policy for BIG-IP K45215395: Guide introduction and contents | Secure against the OWASP Top 10 for 2021 K000135973: Guide Introduction and contents | APIs and the OWASP Top 10 guide (2023) Mitigating OWASP API Security risks using BIG-IP BIG-IP Advanced WAF Webpage Overview of BIG-IP
