WAF engine on Azure Application Gateway

The Azure Web Application Firewall (WAF) engine is the component that inspects traffic and determines whether a request includes a signature that represents a potential attack and takes appropriate action depending on the configuration.

Next generation of WAF engine

The new WAF engine is a high-performance, scalable Microsoft proprietary engine and has significant improvements over the previous WAF engine.

The new engine, released with CRS 3.2, provides the following benefits:

• Improved performance: Significant improvements in WAF latency, including P99 POST and GET latencies. We observed a significant reduction in P99 tail latencies with up to approximately 8x reduction in processing POST requests and approximately 4x reduction in processing GET requests.
• Increased scale: Higher requests per second (RPS), using the same compute power and with the ability to process larger request sizes. Our next-generation engine can scale up to eight times more RPS using the same compute power, and has an ability to process 16 times larger request sizes (up to 2-MB request sizes), which wasn't possible with the previous engine.
• Better protection: New redesigned engine with efficient regex processing offers better protection against RegEx denial of service (DOS) attacks while maintaining a consistent latency experience.
• Richer feature set: New features and future enhancement are available only through the new engine.

Support for new features

There are many new features that are only supported in the Azure WAF engine. The features include:

• CRS 3.2
  • Increased request body size limit to 2 MB
  • Increased file upload limit to 4 GB
• WAF v2 metrics
• Per rule exclusions and support for exclusion attributes by name.
• Increased scale limits
  • HTTP listeners limit
  • WAF IP address ranges per match condition
  • Exclusions limit
• Inspection Limit & Max Size Enforcement can be turned on/off independently of each other and the values for each field can be set independently

New WAF features are only released with later versions of CRS on the new WAF engine.

Request logging for custom rules

There's a difference between how the previous engine and the new WAF engine log requests when a custom rule defines the action type as Log.

When your WAF runs in prevention mode, the previous engine logs the request's action type as Blocked even though the request is allowed through by the custom rule. In detection mode, the previous engine logs the same request's action type as Detected.

In contrast, the new WAF engine logs the request action type as Log, whether the WAF is running in prevention or detection mode.

Next steps

Learn more about WAF managed rules.