Edit Web Application/API Settings

Configuring Web Application security or Web API security is easily done by configuring the relevant asset using its basic details, and in the vast majority of the cases, is enough to protect the web assets without additional manual changes.

There are, however, advanced options that a security administrator can configure to modify the security to his specific requirements.

When making the first change to the default Web Application Best Practice's configuration such as configuring the advanced settings in this page, you will be prompted to change the name of the Practice to your own custom practice name.

Web Application Protection Advanced Settings

Threat Prevention Settings

Browse to Assets, edit the web application asset object you have created and click on the "Threat Prevention" Tab and look at the "Web Attacks" sub-practice configuration.

Configuration Options

Mode override

Setting the Mode to As Top Level means inheriting the primary mode of the practice.

Otherwise you can override it only for this specific sub-practice to Detect/Prevent/Disable.

Confidence-dependent Prevent Mode

The option Activate when confidence is becomes available if practice or sub-practice are set to Prevent. The value determines the threshold in which open-appsec will block attacks and prevent them, rather than just send a log according to Log Trigger configuration.

Advanced settings window

When clicking on Advanced additional advanced settings appear:

For all Size Limits - open-appsec Web Attacks engine will accept traffic that exceeds the limits if set to Detect/Learn mode (and that traffic will bypass inspection), or block traffic that exceeds the limits if set to Prevent mode.

Advanced Setting	Meaning
URL Size (Bytes)	Determines the URL size limit for inspection
Max Object Depth	Determines the depth limit of a JSON/XML object inspected in the HTTP request. This includes embedded XML in JSON and the opposite.
Body Size (Kilobytes)	Determines the HTTP body size limit for inspection
Header Size (Bytes)	Determines the HTTP header size limit for inspection
CSRF Protection	Determines the mode for the advanced CSRF protection, which blocks CSRF attacks. Important - This protection has a performance impact.
Error Disclosure	Determines the mode for the advanced Error Disclosure protection, which replaces internal error codes in the response and injects a different response instead. Important - This protection has a performance impact.
Open Redirect	Determines the mode for the advanced Open Redirect protection, which prevents client side redirection to other domains (e.g. as used by Phishing attacks) Important - This protection has a performance impact.
Non-Valid HTTP methods	When set to No and practice is set to Prevent, non-valid HTTP methods are blocked. Valid HTTP methods are: GET, POST, DELETE, PATCH, PUT, CONNECT, OPTIONS, HEAD, TRACE MKCOL, COPY, MOVE, PROPFIND, PROPPATCH, LOCK, UNLOCK, VERSION-CONTROL, REPORT, INDEX, CHECKOUT, CHECKIN, UNCHECK, MKWORKSPACE, UPDATE, LABEL, MERGE, BASELINE-CONTROL, MKACTIVITY, ORDERPATCH, ACL, SEARCH, MKREDIRECTREF, BIND, UNBIND

Web API Protection Advanced Settings

The advanced configuration for API Attacks is very similar to Web Attacks. The differences being:

• The sub-practice is named API Attacks and not Web Attacks.

• API attacks do not include the advanced options of CSRF Protection, Error Disclosure and Open Redirect.

• See here how to configure the API Schema Enforcement Engine

Additional Security Engines

open-appsec includes additional security engines other in addition to the Machine Learning based-Web Attacks protection and API attacks protection:

Anti-Bot (Web Bots Security)

Enforce API Schema

Intrusion Prevention System (IPS)

Import Snort rules