AWS WAF
AWS Web Application Firewall for protecting agent API endpoints from SQL injection, XSS, bot traffic, and rate limiting attacks via rule groups and IP reputation lists.
Score Breakdown
⚙ Agent Friendliness
🔒 Security
IAM-only auth with fine-grained action-level permissions. WAF itself is the security control — no external auth surface.
⚡ Reliability
Best When
Your agent APIs are behind AWS CloudFront, ALB, or API Gateway and you need managed WAF rules with rate limiting and bot protection.
Avoid When
You're not on AWS or need advanced application layer security that goes beyond simple rule-based pattern matching.
Use Cases
- • Rate limiting agent API endpoints to prevent abuse via WAF rate-based rules
- • Blocking known bad IP ranges and bot traffic from accessing agent services
- • Getting WAF sampled requests and CloudWatch metrics for agent security monitoring
- • Dynamically updating IP block lists via API when agents detect malicious patterns
- • Integrating WAF with CloudFront/ALB to protect agent APIs at the edge layer
Not For
- • Application-layer security testing — WAF is runtime protection, not SAST/DAST
- • Protecting non-AWS endpoints without Global Accelerator
- • Complex custom firewall rules requiring stateful inspection (use Palo Alto or similar NGFW)
Interface
Authentication
AWS IAM with fine-grained WAF permissions (wafv2:GetWebACL, wafv2:UpdateWebACL, wafv2:GetSampledRequests). No user-level auth — IAM only.
Pricing
Managed rule groups (AWS Managed Rules, Bot Control) add $10-20/month per rule group. Bot Control adds $10/month + $1/million requests.
Agent Metadata
Known Gotchas
- ⚠ WAF v1 and v2 (WAFV2) are completely separate services — WAFV2 is current; classic WAF is deprecated
- ⚠ UpdateWebACL requires lock token from GetWebACL — must fetch current state before each update, cannot batch changes
- ⚠ SCOPE parameter (CLOUDFRONT vs REGIONAL) determines where Web ACL can be applied — CloudFront ACLs must be in us-east-1
- ⚠ Sampled requests are available for 3 hours only — implement regular polling for security agents needing historical data
- ⚠ Rule priority matters — rules evaluated in ascending priority order; overlapping rules may cause unexpected blocks
Alternatives
Full Evaluation Report
Detailed scoring breakdown, competitive positioning, security analysis, and improvement recommendations for AWS WAF.
Scores are editorial opinions as of 2026-03-06.