WAF
Protect your applications without sacrificing performance
Cloudflare WAF inspects HTTP/S requests at the edge, using managed and custom rules to identify and block malicious payloads before they can compromise your application.
Zero-Day Protection at Scale
When a new vulnerability emerges (like Log4j), our security team writes and deploys a rule that protects our entire network in hours or minutes. Developers are often protected before they even have time to patch their own code.
Low False Positive Rate
Our Managed Rulesets are run against massive volumes of diverse traffic, allowing us to fine-tune them to be highly effective without blocking legitimate users.
Performance and Ease of Use
The WAF is deployed across our entire global network, so protection is enforced close to the user, adding virtually zero latency. Fully managed via API, fitting seamlessly into CI/CD workflows.
Edge-based security without performance impact
The WAF protects web applications and APIs from common and zero-day exploits (like SQL injection, XSS) without forcing developers to become security experts, manage complex rulesets, or sacrifice application performance. WAF allows developers to ship code faster and with confidence, knowing they have a powerful, auto-updating security layer protecting their work from a huge range of attacks.
![[Background Pattern]](https://www.cloudflare.com/static/pattern.png){kind=link}
OWASP Top 10 Protection
Blocking the OWASP Top 10 vulnerabilities, such as SQL injection (SQLi) and Cross-Site Scripting (XSS), targeting web applications and APIs.Virtual Patching for CVEs
When a CVE is announced for a library or framework a developer is using, the WAF blocks exploits targeting that specific CVE.Inline Malware Gateway
Pipe file-upload endpoints through WAF Content Scanning to act on the returned cf.waf.content_scan.* fields and quarantine or rewrite dangerous files on the fly.Automated Security Updates
Benefit from our network's scale and intelligence with auto-updating security rules that protect against emerging threats without manual intervention.Carrefour
Retail giant Carrefour replaced five separate security tools, put 400 e-commerce sites behind Cloudflare, and cut incident-resolution time by 75% after deploying the WAF (plus Bot Management).
Powerful primitives, seamlessly integrated
Built on systems powering 20% of the Internet, WAF runs on the same infrastructure Cloudflare uses to build Cloudflare. Enterprise-grade reliability, security, and performance are standard.
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