Network Security Engineer - web Application Firewall(WAF)

Role & responsibilities

Preferred candidate profile

Configuration and Deployment

This involves understanding the application architecture and traffic patterns to define security policies, including positive and negative security models.

Positive Security Model: Defining what is allowed (e.g., specific URLs, form fields, cookies) and blocking everything else. This is often used for highly sensitive applications.

Negative Security Model: Using signatures and rules to block known attack patterns (e.g., SQL injection, cross-site scripting (XSS), buffer overflows).

Creating and Managing WAF Profiles: Configuring WAF profiles (HTML, XML, or Web 2.0) to apply specific security checks to different types of application traffic.

Signature Management: Importing, updating, and customizing signature sets to protect against known vulnerabilities.

Binding WAF Policies: Attaching WAF policies to virtual servers or specific bind points to control which traffic is inspected.

Integrating with Load Balancing: Ensuring the WAF works seamlessly with Citrix ADC's load balancing features to secure traffic efficiently.

SSL Offloading and Inspection: Configuring the WAF to decrypt SSL/TLS traffic for inspection and re-encrypt it before forwarding to the backend servers.

Monitoring and Troubleshooting:

Real-time Monitoring: Continuously monitoring WAF logs, statistics, and alerts to identify potential security incidents or performance issues.

Incident Response: Investigating and responding to security alerts and violations, analyzing logs to determine the root cause of attacks.

Troubleshooting Application Issues: Collaborating with application teams to diagnose and resolve any legitimate application traffic being blocked by the WAF. This often involves creating "relaxation rules" to allow intended application behavior.

Performance Tuning: Optimizing WAF configurations to ensure security without negatively impacting application performance. This might involve adjusting security checks, streaming, and other settings.

Security Management and Optimization:

Vulnerability Assessment and Mitigation: Staying updated on new web application vulnerabilities and configuring the WAF to mitigate these threats.

PCI DSS Compliance: Assisting in meeting compliance requirements, such as PCI-DSS, by ensuring appropriate WAF protections are in place to safeguard sensitive data.

Bot Management: Configuring bot mitigation techniques to protect against automated attacks, credential stuffing, and scraping.

API Security: Protecting APIs from various attacks, including API misuse, unauthorized access, and data exfiltration, through authentication, authorization, and schema validation.

Data Leakage Prevention: Configuring the WAF to prevent the inadvertent leakage of sensitive data (e.g., credit card numbers, PII) in responses.

Automating Tasks: Utilizing tools like Citrix Application Delivery Management (ADM) to automate configuration changes, updates, and monitoring across multiple WAF instances.

Documentation: Maintaining comprehensive documentation of WAF configurations, policies, procedures, and incident responses.

Staying Current: Keeping up with Citrix WAF product updates, new features, and security best practices