About this Course

In this 4 day course, students are provided with a functional understanding of how to deploy, tune, and operate F5 Advanced Web Application Firewall to protect their web applications from HTTP-based attacks. The course includes lecture, hands-on labs, and discussion about different F5 Advanced Web Application Firewall tools for detecting and mitigating threats from multiple attack vectors such web scraping, Layer 7 Denial of Service, brute force, bots, code injection, and zero day exploits.

Audience Profile

This course is intended for security and network administrators who will be responsible for the installation, deployment, tuning, and day-to-day maintenance of the F5 Advanced Web Application Firewall.

At Course Completion

Outline

Lesson 1 : Setting Up the BIG-IP System

• Introducing the BIG-IP System
• Initially Setting Up the BIG-IP System
• Archiving the BIG-IP System Configuration
• Leveraging F5 Support Resources and Tools

Lesson 2 : Traffic Processing with BIG-IP

• Identifying BIG-IP Traffic Processing Objects
• Overview of Network Packet Flow
• Understanding Profiles
• Overview of Local Traffic Policies
• Visualizing the HTTP Request Flow

Lesson 3 : Web Application Concepts

• Overview of Web Application Request Processing
• Web Application Firewall: Layer 7 Protection
• F5 Advanced WAF Layer 7 Security Checks
• Overview of Web Communication Elements
• Overview of the HTTP Request Structure
• Examining HTTP Responses
• How F5 Advanced WAF Parses File Types, URLs, and Parameters
• Using the Fiddler HTTP Proxy

Lesson 4 : Common Web Application Vulnerabilities

• A Taxonomy of Attacks: The Threat Landscape
• What Elements of Application Delivery are Targeted?
• Common Exploits Against Web Applications

Lesson 5 : Security Policy Deployment

• Defining Learning
• Comparing Positive and Negative Security Models
• The Deployment Workflow
• Policy Type: How Will the Policy Be Applied
• Policy Template: Determines the Level of Protection
• Policy Templates: Automatic or Manual Policy Building
• Assigning Policy to Virtual Server
• Deployment Workflow: Using Advanced Settings
• Selecting the Enforcement Mode
• The Importance of Application Language
• Configure Server Technologies
• Verify Attack Signature Staging
• Viewing Requests
• Security Checks Offered by Rapid Deployment
• Defining Attack Signatures
• Using Data Guard to Check Responses

Lesson 6 : Policy Tuning and Violations

• Post-Deployment Traffic Processing
• Defining Violations
• Defining False Positives
• How Violations are Categorized
• Violation Rating: A Threat Scale
• Defining Staging and Enforcement
• Defining Enforcement Mode
• Defining the Enforcement Readiness Period
• Reviewing the Definition of Learning
• Defining Learning Suggestions
• Choosing Automatic or Manual Learning
• Defining the Learn, Alarm and Block Settings
• Interpreting the Enforcement Readiness Summary
• Configuring the Blocking Response Page

Lesson 7 : Attack Signatures

• Defining Attack Signatures
• Attack Signature Basics
• Creating User-Defined Attack Signatures
• Defining Simple and Advanced Edit Modes
• Defining Attack Signature Sets
• Defining Attack Signature Pools
• Understanding Attack Signatures and Staging
• Updating Attack Signatures

Lesson 8 : Positive Security Policy Building

• Defining and Learning Security Policy Components
• Defining the Wildcard
• Defining the Entity Lifecycle
• Choosing the Learning Scheme
• How to Learn: Never (Wildcard Only)
• How to Learn: Always
• How to Learn: Selective
• Reviewing the Enforcement Readiness Period: Entities
• Viewing Learning Suggestions and Staging Status
• Violations Without Learning Suggestions
• Defining the Learning Score
• Defining Trusted and Untrusted IP Addresses
• How to Learn: Compact

Lesson 9 : Cookies and Other Headers

• F5 Advanced WAF Cookies: What to Enforce
• Defining Allowed and Enforced Cookies
• Configuring Security Processing on HTTP headers

Lesson 10 : Reporting and Logging

• Overview: Big Picture Data
• Reporting: Build Your Own View
• Reporting: Chart based on filters
• Brute Force and Web Scraping Statistics
• Viewing F5 Advanced WAF Resource Reports
• PCI Compliance: PCI-DSS 3.0
• The Attack Expert System
• Viewing Traffic Learning Graphs
• Local Logging Facilities and Destinations
• How to Enable Local Logging of Security Events
• Viewing Logs in the Configuration Utility
• Exporting Requests
• Logging Profiles: Build What You Need
• Configuring Response Logging

Lesson 11 : Lab Project 1

Lesson 12 : Advanced Parameter Handling

• Defining Parameter Types
• Defining Static Parameters
• Defining Dynamic Parameters
• Defining Dynamic Parameter Extraction Properties
• Defining Parameter Levels
• Other Parameter Considerations

Lesson 13 : Policy Diff and Administration

• Comparing Security Policies with Policy Diff
• Merging Security Policies
• Restoring with Policy History
• Examples of F5 Advanced WAF Deployment Types
• ConfigSync and F5 Advanced WAF Security Data
• ASMQKVIEW: Provide to F5 Support for Troubleshooting

Lesson 14 : Automatic Policy Building

• Overview of Automatic Policy Building
• Defining Templates Which Automate Learning
• Defining Policy Loosening
• Defining Policy Tightening
• Defining Learning Speed: Traffic Sampling
• Defining Track Site Changes

Lesson 15 : Web Application Vulnerability Scanner Integration

• Integrating Scanner Output into F5 Advanced WAF
• Will Scan be Used for a New or Existing Policy?
• Importing Vulnerabilities
• Resolving Vulnerabilities
• Using the Generic XML Scanner XSD file

Lesson 16 : Layered Policies

• Defining a Parent Policy
• Defining Inheritance
• Parent Policy Deployment Use Cases

Lesson 17 : Login Enforcement, Brute Force Mitigation, and Session Tracking

• Defining Login Pages
• Configuring Automatic Detection of Login Pages
• Defining Session Tracking
• What Are Brute Force Attacks?
• Brute Force Protection Configuration
• Defining Source-Based Protection
• Source-Based Brute Force Mitigations
• Defining Session Tracking
• Configuring Actions Upon Violation Detection
• Session Hijacking Mitigation Using Device ID

Lesson 18 : Web Scraping Mitigation and Geolocation Enforcement

• Defining Web Scraping
• Mitigating Web Scraping
• Defining Geolocation Enforcement
• Configuring IP Address Exceptions

Lesson 19 : Layer 7 DoS Mitigation and Advanced Bot Protection

• Defining Denial of Service Attacks
• The General Flow of DoS Protection
• Defining the DoS Profile
• Overview of TPS-based DoS Protection
• Applying TPS mitigations
• Create a DoS Logging Profile
• Defining DoS Profile General Settings
• Defining Bot Signatures
• Defining Proactive Bot Defense
• Defining Behavioral and Stress-Based Detection
• Defining Behavioral DoS Mitigation

Lesson 20 : F5 Advanced WAF and iRules

• Common Uses for iRules
• Identifying iRule Components
• Triggering iRules with Events
• Defining F5 Advanced WAF iRule Events
• Defining F5 Advanced WAF iRule Commands
• Using F5 Advanced WAF iRule Event Modes

Lesson 21 : Using Content Profiles

• Defining Asynchronous JavaScript and XML
• Defining JavaScript Object Notation (JSON)
• Defining Content Profiles
• The Order of Operations for URL Classification

Lesson 22 : Review and Final Labs

Prerequisites

Administering BIG-IP; basic familiarity with HTTP, HTML and XML; basic web application and security concepts.