Citrix Firewall for Web Application Protection

Protecting websites and private web services against attacks requires a multi-layered defense capable of preventing known attacks with specific characteristics and safeguarding against unknown attacks. Often, these unknown attacks can be detected because they appear different from regular traffic to the user's websites and web services. The Citrix Web App firewall is one of the best solutions to ensure web security.

What is the Citrix Firewall?

The Citrix Web App is a protective firewall that prevents security breaches, data loss, and unauthorized modifications potentially impacting websites containing sensitive business or client information. It achieves this by filtering both requests and responses, examining them for evidence of malicious activity, and blocking requests that exhibit such behavior.

The Citrix Web App firewall safeguards the user's website from common types of attacks as well as new, unknown attacks. Additionally, it protects web servers and websites from unauthorized access.

How Citrix Web Application Firewall Works?

When installing the Citrix Web App firewall, it creates an initial security configuration. The firewall includes over a thousand signatures across seven categories, each directed against specific types of web servers and web content. Citrix updates the signature list with new signatures, identifying new threats during the configuration. It selects appropriate signature categories for web servers and content to be protected.

These signatures provide good basic protection with low processing costs. If user applications have specific security vulnerabilities or if an attack is detected with no existing signature, users can add their own signatures through Citrix Web App. These advanced protection measures are called Security Scans. Security scans involve a stricter, account-based examination of requests for specific patterns or types of behavior that may indicate an attack or pose a threat to protected websites and user web services.

For example, identifying a request attempting to execute a specific type of operation that could breach security or a response containing sensitive information such as a social security number or credit card number. During configuration, it identifies appropriate security scans for web servers and content that users need to protect. Many of them can block legitimate requests and responses if suitable exceptions (relaxation operations) are not added during configuration.

Citrix Firewall Web Application Features

• Policy, Profile, and Signature Provisioning: Provides policies, profiles, and signatures that offer a mixed security model, addressing both known and unknown web attacks. It illustrates how the Citrix Firewall Web Application functions.

• Learning Feature: Monitors traffic to protected applications, recommends appropriate configuration settings for specific security scans. Manages the import of files uploaded to the Web Application Firewall, which are then utilized by Citrix Firewall in various security scans. Features include logs, statistics, reports, and identifying potential needs for additional protection.

• Protection Against Cache Bypass Attacks: Guards against cache bypass attacks, security file injection attacks, SQL injection attacks, and cross-site scripting attacks.

• Response Header and Body Inspection: Citrix Firewall provides an option to inspect response headers and bodies, removing credit card numbers before redirecting the response to the client. It can also prevent leakage of other sensitive data using secure object security scans for the application firewall, either by removing or deleting sensitive content in the response.

• Prevention of Attacks on Unsafe Operating Systems: Prevents attacks against insecure operating systems or web server software that may behave unexpectedly when receiving data larger than they can handle.

• Restriction of Direct Access to Random URLs: Prevents direct access to random URLs on the site. Additionally, it includes robust browsing restrictions through bookmarks, external links, page jumping, or manual entry of URLs.

Note: "URL" stands for "Uniform Resource Locator."

Note: "SQL" stands for "Structured Query Language."

Some Citrix Firewall Alternatives

1. AppTrana Web Security Tool:  AppTrana is a powerful product that provides a different and unique approach to application security. It focuses on identifying application risks and strengthening weak links for successful protection. AppTrana WAF comes with core rule sets created by professionals to defend websites against major vulnerabilities identified by OWASP. It swiftly corrects any vulnerabilities detected.
   
   
   
2. Imperva App Protect Application: Imperva Incapsula offers an enterprise-level web application firewall (WAF) to protect the site from the latest threats. It provides intelligent and immediate solutions against DDoS attacks, along with performance monitoring and analysis services to offer insights into web security and performance.
   
   
   
3.  ModSecurity Firewall: ModSecurity is an open-source web application firewall developed by Trustwave’s SpiderLabs.
   
   
   
4. Advanced Web Application Firewall: The Advanced Web Application Firewall is designed to proactively detect and mitigate robot activities, secure credentials and sensitive data, and defend against Denial of Service (DoS) attacks. Advanced WAF is offered as a physical device, a virtual version, and a managed service, providing automated WAF services that precisely meet deployment and complex management requirements. It is the most effective solution for safeguarding modern applications and data from current and emerging threats while maintaining compliance with key regulatory authorizations. The Advanced WAF redefines application security to address the most common threats faced by enterprises today, such as web attacks that steal credential data, gain unauthorized access through user accounts, and application layer attacks that evade static security based on reputation and manual signatures.

   Note: "DoS" stands for "Denial of Service."

Barracuda CloudGen Firewall

(Barracuda CloudGen Firewalls) provide a wide range of security and connectivity features, including web filtering, SSL, and other remote access features, as well as protection such as advanced devices and Internet of Things (IoT) security.

Note: "SSL" is an abbreviation for "Secure Sockets Layer."

Cisco Devices

(Cisco) routers support secure and reliable enterprise communications. These enterprise router devices help users implement a future-ready wide area network (WAN) that continuously learns, adapts, and protects.

Note: "WAN" is an abbreviation for "wide area network."

The centralized nature of the (Citrix Firewall) ensures the protection of user applications regardless of the architecture or deployment location. This allows all applications to benefit from consistent policies. Additionally, it can block requests or regulate their rate based on IP address or geographic location, and it proxies all traffic through the firewall for better control.