A web application firewall, better known as a WAF, is a security device designed to protect organizations at the application level. WAFs achieve this goal by monitoring, filtering, and analyzing traffic between the internet and a web application. Acting as a reverse proxy, the purpose of a common web application firewall is to shield applications from malicious requests.

A WAF can protect your organization against a range of application-layer attacks, including SQL injection, cross-site scripting (XSS) attacks, cross-site request forgery, denial of service and distributed denial of service attacks, cookie poisoning, and zero-day attacks.

Despite these benefits, the issue is that enterprises usually attempt to secure APIs just like they secure web applications—with WAFs, for example. Most enterprises have invested in WAFs and API gateways to manage their APIs and secure their web applications. However, neither a WAF, load balancer, nor a web API security gateway can protect against all API attacks and vulnerabilities. As evidence, we consistently find that 30% of APIs are not even routed through these tools in our customer environments.

With that said, the Noname API Security Platform integrates seamlessly with WAFs, clouds, and gateways to fill in the gaps. Our goal is to work together with existing infrastructure rather than compete against it.

Learn more about web application firewalls here:
https://nonamesecurity.com/learn/what-is-web-application-firewall/

Learn more about the role WAFs and API gateways play in API security:
https://nonamesecurity.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/Gateways-WAFs-and-API-Security.pdf