Calico Cloud documentation

Workload-based Web Application Firewall (WAF)

note

This feature is tech preview. Tech preview features may be subject to significant changes before they become GA.

Big picture

Protect cloud-native applications from application layer attacks with Calico Cloud Workload-based Web Application Firewall (WAF).

Value

Our workload-centric Web Application Firewall (WAF) protects your workloads from a variety of application layer attacks originating from within your cluster such as SQL injection. Given that attacks on apps are the leading cause of breaches, you need to secure the HTTP traffic inside your cluster.

Historically, web application firewalls (WAFs) were deployed at the edge of your cluster to filter incoming traffic. Our workload-based WAF solution takes a unique, cloud-native approach to web security by allowing you to implement zero-trust rules for workloads inside your cluster.

Concepts

About Calico Cloud WAF

WAF is deployed in your cluster with Envoy as a sidecar container on your pods. Calico Cloud proxies traffic through Envoy, checking HTTP requests using the industry-standard ModSecurity with OWASP Core Rule Set v4.7.0 with some modifications for Kubernetes workloads.

You simply enable WAF in the web console, and determine the deployments that you want to enable for WAF protection. By default WAF is set to DetectionOnly so no traffic will be denied until you are ready to turn on blocking mode.

Every request that WAF finds an issue with, will result in a Security Event being created for you to review in the UI, regardless of whether the traffic was allowed or denied. This can greatly help in tuning later.

How WAF determines if a request should be allowed or denied

If you configure WAF in blocking mode, WAF will use something called anomaly scoring mode to determine if a request is allowed with 200 OK or denied 403 Forbidden.

This works by matching a single HTTP request against all the configured WAF rules. Each rule has a score and WAF adds all the matched rule scores together, and compares it to the overall anomaly threshold score (100 by default). If the score is under the threshold the request is allowed and if the score is over the threshold the request is denied. Our WAF starts in detection mode only and with a high default scoring threshold so is safe to turn on and then fine-tune the WAF for your specific needs in your cluster.

Before you begin

Limitations

WAF cannot be used with:

Host-networked client pods
TLS traffic
LoadBalancer services
Kubernetes 1.28 or earlier

note

When selecting and deselecting traffic for WAF, active connections may be disrupted.

caution

You should enable WAF only for your application pods. If you enable WAF for deployments that are part of the Kubernetes system itself, you may create an undesirable cluster state.

Enable WAF

Enable WAF using the CLI

Using kubectl

Create an (or edit an existing) ApplicationLayer resource named tigera-secure, set the sidecarInjection field to Enabled.

kubectl apply -f - <<EOF
apiVersion: operator.tigera.io/v1
kind: ApplicationLayer
metadata:
  name: tigera-secure
spec:
  sidecarInjection: Enabled
EOF

Or, in the web console, click Threat Defense > Web Application Firewall > Configure Web Application Firewall.

(Optional) Deploy a sample application

If you don’t have an application to test WAF with or don’t want to use it right away against your own application, we recommend that you install the GoogleCloudPlatform/microservices-demo app:

kubectl apply -f https://raw.githubusercontent.com/GoogleCloudPlatform/microservices-demo/main/release/kubernetes-manifests.yaml

Apply WAF to deployments

Now that you have deployed WAF in your cluster, you can select the deployments you want to protect from application layer attacks.

If you have deployed the sample application, you can apply WAF on a deployment associated with your app, as follows:

kubectl patch deployment frontend -n default -p '{"spec":{"template":{"metadata":{"labels":{"applicationlayer.projectcalico.org/sidecar":"true"},"annotations":{"applicationlayer.projectcalico.org/waf":"Enabled"}}}}}'

Alternatively, you can use the web console to apply WAF to the frontend deployment if you opted for sidecars.

In this example, we applied WAF to the frontend pods. This means that every request that goes through the frontend deployment is inspected. However, the traffic is not blocked because the WAF rule is set to DetectionOnly by default. You can adjust rules and start blocking traffic by fine-tuning your WAF.

In the previous example, we applied WAF to the frontend deployment of the sample application. Here, we are applying WAF to a deployment of your own application.

On the web console, click Threat Defense, Web Application Firewall.
Select the deployments you want WAF to inspect, and then click Confirm Selections.
On the Web Application Firewall page, you can verify that WAF is enabled for a deployment by locating the deployment and checking that the Status column says Enabled.
To make further changes to a deployment, click Actions, and then Enable or Disable.

You have now applied WAF rule sets to your own deployments, and note that the traffic that goes through the selected deployments will be alerted but not blocked by default.

Trigger a WAF event

If you would like to trigger a WAF event for testing purposes, you can simulate an SQL injection attack inside your cluster by crafting a HTTP request with a query string that WAF will detect as an SQL injection attempt. The query string in this example has some SQL syntax embedded in the text. This is harmless and for demo purposes, but WAF will detect this pattern and create an event for this HTTP request.

Run a simple curl command from any pod inside your cluster targeting a deployment you have selected for WAF protection e.g. from the demo app above we could attempt to send a simple HTTP request to the cartservice.

  curl http://cartservice/cart?artist=0+div+1+union%23foo*%2F*bar%0D%0Aselect%23foo%0D%0A1%2C2%2Ccurrent_user

Manage WAF configuration

Reviewing the default rule set config:

Include coraza.conf
Include crs-setup.conf
Include coreruleset/*.conf

SecRuleEngine DetectionOnly

The configuration file starts with importing the appropriate rule set config. We use Coraza WAF's recommended Core Rule Set setup files:

Coraza recommended configuration with coraza.conf and crs-setup.conf (kept in the same ConfigMap)
The rest of the coreruleset files, currently v4.7.0

These files can be customized if desired. Add all your customizations directly under tigera.conf:

kubectl edit cm -n tigera-operator tigera-waf-config

After editing this ConfigMap successfully, the tigera-waf-config ConfigMap will be replaced in the tigera-operator namespace, which then triggers a rolling restart of your L7 pods. This means that the HTTP connections going through L7 pods at the time of pod termination will be (RST) reset.

note

It is important to adhere to the Core Rule Set documentation on how to edit the behaviour of your WAF. A good place to begin at is the Installing Core Rule Set.

In many scenarios, the default example CRS configuration will be a good enough starting point. It is recommended to review the example configuration file before you deploy it to make sure it’s right for your environment.

Customization options

Set WAF to block traffic

By default WAF will not block a request even if it has matching rule violations. The rule engine is set to DetectionOnly. You can configure to block traffic instead with an HTTP 403 Forbidden response status code when the combined matched rules scores exceed a certain threshold.

Edit the configmap:

kubectl edit cm -n tigera-operator tigera-waf-config

Look for SecRuleEngine DetectionOnly and change it to SecRuleEngine On.
Save your changes. This triggers a rolling update of the L7 pods.

Action	Description	Disruptive?
DetectionOnly	Traffic is not denied nor dropped. Calico Cloud will log events.	No
On	Denies HTTP traffic. Calico Cloud will log the event in Security Events.	Yes
Off	Be cautious about using this option. Traffic is not denied, and there are no events.	No

Other basic customizations

For basic customizations, it's best to add it after all the includes in tigera.conf. In fact, this is the reason why the SecRuleEngine directive and the rest of our customizations are situated there.

An example is adding a sampling mode. For that, the tigera.conf will look like this:

# CoreRuleset activation
Include coraza.conf
Include crs-setup.conf
Include coreruleset/*.conf

SecRuleEngine DetectionOnly

# --- all customizations appear below this line, unless they need a specific loading order like plugins ---

# --- Add sampling mode
# Read about sampling mode here https://coreruleset.org/docs/2-how-crs-works/2-4-sampling_mode/
SecAction "id:900400,\
  phase:1,\
  pass,\
  nolog,\
  setvar:tx.sampling_percentage=50"

Also you can disable certain rules here:

# --- disable 'Request content type is not allowed by policy'
SecRuleRemoveById 920420

Change anomaly scoring threshold:

  SecAction \
  "id:900110,\
  phase:1,\
  nolog,\
  pass,\
  t:none,\
  setvar:tx.inbound_anomaly_score_threshold=25,\
  setvar:tx.outbound_anomaly_score_threshold=20"

Or even change rule action parameters or behavior. For example:

# --- append to more allowed content types to request bodies
SecAction \
 "id:900220,\
 phase:1,\
 nolog,\
 pass,\
 t:none,\
 setvar:'tx.allowed_request_content_type=|application/x-www-form-urlencoded| |multipart/form-data| |multipart/related| |text/xml| |application/xml| |application/soap+xml| |application/json| |application/cloudevents+json| |application/cloudevents-batch+json| |application/grpc|'"

Using Core Rule Set plugins

Let's go with an example plugin: Wordpress Rule Exclusions.

Plugin files are the following:

wordpress-rule-exclusions-before.conf
wordpress-rule-exclusions-config.conf

To include these files properly, structure your work directory like so:

tigera.conf
coraza.conf
crs-setup.conf
wordpress-rule-exclusions-before.conf
wordpress-rule-exclusions-config.conf

and then tigera.conf contents should be:

Include coraza.conf

Include wordpress-rule-exclusions-config.conf
Include wordpress-rule-exclusions-before.conf

Include crs-setup.conf
Include coreruleset/*.conf

# if your plugin has an -after.conf, include them here
# but wordpress rule exclusions doesn't so we're adding a comment placeholder
# Include wordpress-rule-exclusions-after.conf

SecRuleEngine DetectionOnly

Then create and apply the configmap:

## create the configuration map itself
kubectl create cm --dry-run=client \
  --from-file=tigera.conf \
  --from-file=coraza.conf \
  --from-file=crs-setup.conf \
  --from-file=wordpress-rule-exclusions-config.conf \
  --from-file=wordpress-rule-exclusions-before.conf \
  -n tigera-operator tigera-waf-config -o yaml  > ruleset.configmap.yaml

## replace active configmap
kubectl replace -f ruleset.configmap.yaml

Read more about the order of execution for plugins here: https://coreruleset.org/docs/4-about-plugins/4-1-plugins/

View WAF events

Security Events

To view WAF events in a centralized security events dashboard, go to: Threat defense, Security Events. For help, see Security Event Management.

Kibana

To view WAF events In Kibana, select the tigera_secure_ee_waf* index pattern.

Disable WAF for a deployment

To disable WAF on a deployment, use the Actions menu on the WAF board, or use the following command:

kubectl patch deployment <deployment-name> -n <deployment-namespace> --type='json' -p '[{"op":"remove","path":"/spec/template/metadata/labels/applicationlayer.projectcalico.org~1sidecar"},{"op":"remove","path":"/spec/template/metadata/annotations/applicationlayer.projectcalico.org~1waf"}]'

Disable WAF feature from your cluster

To safely disable WAF, determine how to handle ApplicationLayer features and follow the steps:

Disable all ApplicationLayer features, including WAF

kubectl delete applicationlayer tigera-secure

Keep some ApplicationLayer features enabled

To disable WAF but keep some ApplicationLayer features enabled, you must update the ApplicationLayer custom resource.

Note that the ApplicationLayer Specification can specify configuration for Application Logging and Application Layer Policy also.

For the ApplicationLayer custom resource to be valid, at least one of these features have to be enabled, for example:

Valid YAML

WAF disabled, ALP enabled (using per-host proxy), and Log collection is unspecified (and the default is disabled)

apiVersion: operator.tigera.io/v1
kind: ApplicationLayer
metadata:
  name: tigera-secure
spec:
  webApplicationFirewall: Disabled
  applicationLayerPolicy: Enabled
  sidecarInjection: Disabled

Invalid YAML

WAF and ALP both set as disabled, log collection is unspecified (and the default is disabled)

apiVersion: operator.tigera.io/v1
kind: ApplicationLayer
metadata:
  name: tigera-secure
spec:
  webApplicationFirewall: Disabled
  applicationLayerPolicy: Disabled
  sidecarInjection: Disabled

Big picture​

Value​

Concepts​

About Calico Cloud WAF​

How WAF determines if a request should be allowed or denied​

Before you begin​

Limitations​

Enable WAF​

Enable WAF using the CLI​

Using kubectl​

(Optional) Deploy a sample application​

Apply WAF to deployments​

Trigger a WAF event​

Manage WAF configuration​

Customization options​

Set WAF to block traffic​

Other basic customizations​

Using Core Rule Set plugins​

View WAF events​

Security Events​

Kibana​

Disable WAF for a deployment​

Disable WAF feature from your cluster​

Disable all ApplicationLayer features, including WAF​

Keep some ApplicationLayer features enabled​

Valid YAML​

Invalid YAML​

Big picture

Value

Concepts

About Calico Cloud WAF

How WAF determines if a request should be allowed or denied

Before you begin

Limitations

Enable WAF

Enable WAF using the CLI

Using kubectl

(Optional) Deploy a sample application

Apply WAF to deployments

Trigger a WAF event

Manage WAF configuration

Customization options

Set WAF to block traffic

Other basic customizations

Using Core Rule Set plugins

View WAF events

Security Events

Kibana

Disable WAF for a deployment

Disable WAF feature from your cluster

Disable all ApplicationLayer features, including WAF

Keep some ApplicationLayer features enabled

Valid YAML

Invalid YAML