COMPARISON BETWEEN AMAZON (WAF) WEB APPLICATION FIREWALL AND AMAZON GUARD DUTY

In this article, we will be learning about AWS (WAF) Web Application Firewall and Amazon GUARD DUTY.

AWS?

AWS stands for Amazon Web Server is an Amazon subsidiary that on a metered pay-as-you-go basis, offers on-demand cloud computing platforms and APIs to individuals, enterprises, and governments. A number of fundamental abstract technological technology and distributed computing building blocks and tools are offered by these cloud computing web services. One of these services is Amazon Elastic Computing Cloud (EC2), which enables users to have at their disposal a virtual cluster of computers accessible all the time via the Internet. The virtual machine version of AWS emulates most of the attributes of a real computer, including hardware central processing units and processing graphics processing units local/RAM memory; hard disk/SSD storage; operating system selection; networking; and preloaded application software such as web servers and databases.

WEB APPLICATION FIREWALL (WAF)

AWS WAF is a firewall for web applications that helps protect your web apps or APIs from popular web vulnerabilities that can impact usability, compromise protection, or consume excessive resources. AWS WAF gives you power over how traffic reaches your applications by allowing you to create security rules that block common patterns of attack, such as SQL injection or cross-site scripting, and rules that filter out the specific traffic patterns you find. You can get started quickly with Regulated Rules for AWS WAF, a preconfigured set of rules run by AWS or AWS Marketplace Sellers.

WAF’s Controlled Rules answer concerns such as the Top 10 security threats for OWASP. These recommendations are regularly updated as new issues arise. AWS WAF provides a full-featured API that you can use to automate security rules development, deployment, and maintenance. You pay just for what you use with AWS WAF.

The pricing is dependent on how many rules you enforce and how many web requests are received by your application. No upfront obligations exist. we can deploy AWS WAF on Amazon CloudFront as part of your CDN solution, the Application Load Balancer that fronts your web servers or origin servers running on EC2, Amazon API Gateway for your REST APIs, or AWS AppSync for your GraphQL APIs.

AMAZON GUARD DUTY (Intelligent threat detection)

Amazon Guard Duty is a threat monitoring service that continuously monitors the malicious behavior and unauthorized activities of your AWS accounts, workloads, and data stored in Amazon S3 to protect them. The collection and aggregation of account and network activities are simplified with the cloud, but the ongoing review of event log data for possible threats can be time-consuming for security teams. With Guard Duty, we now have an intelligent and cost-effective alternative to continuous AWS threat detection. In order to identify and prioritize possible threats, the service uses machine learning, anomaly detection, and advanced threat intelligence. Via different AWS data sources, Guard Duty analyses tens of billions of events, such as AWS CloudTrail event logs, Amazon VPC Flow Logs, and DNS logs. Guard Duty can be activated with a few clicks in the AWS Management Console with no software or hardware to be deployed or maintained. By integrating with Amazon CloudWatch Events, GuardDuty alerts are actionable, easy to aggregate across multiple accounts, and simple to push into existing event management and workflow frameworks.

COMPARISON BETWEEN (WAF) WEB APPLICATION FIREWALL AND GUARD DUTY

AWS WAF is a firewall for web applications that helps protect your web applications against popular web vulnerabilities that can affect the availability of applications, compromise security, or consume excessive resources.

Amazon GuardDuty is a controlled threat monitoring service that continuously tracks your AWS accounts and workloads for a malicious or unwanted activity to help you protect them. It monitors events that indicate a potential violation of an account, such as erratic API calls or potentially unauthorized deployments. GuardDuty also detects likely corrupted instances or attacker awareness.

AWS WAF is a firewall of the web application that can be installed in front of the web application to track HTTP requests and avoid any harmful requests. This is for traffic on the web only.

On the other hand, Amazon GuardDuty is an active system for intruder detection that continuously monitors unusual configuration changes and anomalies in your AWS account and notifies interested parties of further actions.

MY OPINION

Both are best because (WAF) handle or protect the web application or API and the second one that is GUARD DUTY its role in was is to detect the threat which is harmful to AWS account, workloads, and the data storage which are available in Amazon S3