Testing and deploying ATP

This section provides general guidance for configuring and testing an AWS WAF Fraud Control account takeover prevention (ATP) implementation for your site. The specific steps that you choose to follow will depend on your needs, resources, and web requests that you receive.

This information is in addition to the general information about testing and tuning provided at Testing and tuning your AWS WAF protections.

Note

AWS Managed Rules are designed to protect you from common web threats. When used in accordance with the documentation, AWS Managed Rules rule groups add another layer of security for your applications. However, AWS Managed Rules rule groups aren't intended as a replacement for your security responsibilities, which are determined by the AWS resources that you select. Refer to the Shared Responsibility Model to ensure that your resources in AWS are properly protected.

Production traffic risk

Before you deploy your ATP implementation for production traffic, test and tune it in a staging or testing environment until you are comfortable with the potential impact to your traffic. Then test and tune the rules in count mode with your production traffic before enabling them.

AWS WAF provides test credentials that you can use to verify your ATP configuration. In the following procedure, you'll configure a test web ACL to use the ATP managed rule group, configure a rule to capture the label added by the rule group, and then run a login attempt using these test credentials. You'll verify that your web ACL has properly managed the attempt by checking the Amazon CloudWatch metrics for the login attempt.

This guidance is intended for users who know generally how to create and manage AWS WAF web ACLs, rules, and rule groups. Those topics are covered in prior sections of this guide.

To configure and test an AWS WAF Fraud Control account takeover prevention (ATP) implementation

Perform these steps first in a test environment, then in production.

1. Add the AWS WAF Fraud Control account takeover prevention (ATP) managed rule group in count mode

   Note

   You are charged additional fees when you use this managed rule group. For more information, see AWS WAF Pricing.

   Add the AWS Managed Rules rule group AWSManagedRulesATPRuleSet to a new or existing web ACL and configure it so that it doesn't alter the current web ACL behavior. For details about the rules and labels for this rule group, see AWS WAF Fraud Control account takeover prevention (ATP) rule group.

   • When you add the managed rule group, edit it and do the following:

     • In the Rule group configuration pane, provide the details of your application's login page. The ATP rule group uses this information to monitor sign-in activities. For more information, see Adding the ATP managed rule group to your web ACL.

     • In the Rules pane, open the Override all rule actions dropdown and choose Count. With this configuration, AWS WAF evaluates requests against all of the rules in the rule group and only counts the matches that result, while still adding labels to requests. For more information, see Overriding rule actions in a rule group.

       With this override, you can monitor the potential impact of the ATP managed rules to determine whether you want to add exceptions, such as exceptions for internal use cases.

   • Position the rule group so that it's evaluated after your existing rules in the web ACL, with a priority setting that's numerically higher than any rules or rule groups that you're already using. For more information, see Processing order of rules and rule groups in a web ACL.

     This way, your current handling of traffic isn't disrupted. For example, if you have rules that detect malicious traffic such as SQL injection or cross-site scripting, they'll continue to detect and log that. Alternately, if you have rules that allow known non-malicious traffic, they can continue to allow that traffic, without having it blocked by the ATP managed rule group. You might decide to adjust the processing order during your testing and tuning activities.

2. Enable sampling, logging, and metrics for the web ACL

   As needed, configure logging for the web ACL, and enable sampling and Amazon CloudWatch metrics. You can use these visibility tools to monitor the interaction of the ATP managed rule group with your traffic.

   • For information about configuring and using logging, see Logging AWS WAF web ACL traffic.

   • For information about Amazon CloudWatch metrics, see Monitoring with Amazon CloudWatch.

   • For information about web request sampling, see Viewing a sample of web requests.

3. Associate the web ACL with a resource

   If the web ACL isn't already associated with a test resource, associate it. For information, see Associating or disassociating a web ACL with an AWS resource.

4. Monitor traffic and ATP rule matches

   Make sure that your normal traffic is flowing and that the ATP managed rule group rules are adding labels to matching web requests. You can see the labels in the logs and see the ATP and label metrics in the Amazon CloudWatch metrics. In the logs, the rules that you've overridden to count in the rule group show up in the ruleGroupList with action set to count, and with overriddenAction indicating the configured rule action that you overrode.

5. Test the rule group's credential checking capabilities

   Perform a login attempt with test compromised credentials and check that the rule group matches against them as expected.

   1. Log in to your protected resource's login page using the following AWS WAF test credential pair:

      • User: [e-mail]

      • Password: WAF_TEST_CREDENTIAL_PASSWORD

      These test credentials are categorized as compromised credentials, and the ATP managed rule group will add the awswaf:managed:aws:atp:signal:credential_compromised label to the login request, which you can see in the logs.

   2. In your web ACL logs, look for the awswaf:managed:aws:atp:signal:credential_compromised label in the labels field on the log entries for your test login web requests. For information about logging, see Logging AWS WAF web ACL traffic.

   After you've verified that the rule group captures compromised credentials as expected, you can take steps to configure its implementation as you need for your protected resource.

6. For CloudFront distributions, test the rule group's login failure management

   1. Run a test for each failure response criteria that you configured for the ATP rule group. Wait at least 10 minutes between tests.

      To test a single failure criteria, identify a login attempt that will fail with that criteria in the response. Then, from a single client IP address, perform at least 10 failed login attempts in under 10 minutes.

      After the first 6 failures, the volumetric failed login rule should start matching against the rest of your attempts, labeling and counting them. The rule might miss the first one or two due to latency.

   2. In your web ACL logs, look for the awswaf:managed:aws:atp:aggregate:volumetric:ip:failed_login_response:high label in the labels field on the log entries for your test login web requests. For information about logging, see Logging AWS WAF web ACL traffic.

   These tests verify that your failure criteria match your responses by checking that the failed login counts surpass the thresholds for the rule VolumetricIpFailedLoginResponseHigh. After you've reached the thresholds, if you continue to send login requests from the same IP address, the rule will continue to match until the failure rate drops below the threshold. While the thresholds are exceeded, the rule matches both successful or failed logins from the IP address.

7. Customize ATP web request handling

   As needed, add your own rules that explicitly allow or block requests, to change how ATP rules would otherwise handle them.

   For example, you can use ATP labels to allow or block requests or to customize request handling. You can add a label match rule after the ATP managed rule group to filter labeled requests for the handling that you want to apply. After testing, keep the related ATP rules in count mode, and maintain the request handling decisions in your custom rule. For an example, see ATP example: Custom handling for missing and compromised credentials.

8. Remove your test rules and enable the ATP managed rule group settings

   Depending on your situation, you might have decided that you want to leave some ATP rules in count mode. For the rules that you want to run as configured inside the rule group, disable count mode in the web ACL rule group configuration. When you're finished testing, you can also remove your test label match rules.

9. Monitor and tune

   To be sure that web requests are being handled as you want, closely monitor your traffic after you enable the ATP functionality that you intend to use. Adjust the behavior as needed with the rules count override on the rule group and with your own rules.

After you finish testing your ATP rule group implementation, if you haven't already done so, we strongly recommend that you integrate the AWS WAF JavaScript SDK into your browser login page, for enhanced detection capabilities. AWS WAF also provides mobile SDKs to integrate iOS and Android devices. For more information about the integration SDKs, see AWS WAF client application integration. For information about this recommendation, see Why you should use the application integration SDKs with ATP.