Cloudflare – WAF

Cloudflare WAF is an edge-deployed Web Application Firewall that inspects HTTP/S traffic using managed and custom rules to identify and block malicious payloads before they reach applications. Deployed across Cloudflare’s global network, the WAF enforces protections close to users, minimizing added latency while protecting web applications and APIs from common and zero-day exploits such as SQL injection and XSS. The service provides rapid zero-day mitigation—Cloudflare’s security team can write and deploy rules to the entire network within minutes or hours, often protecting developers before they can patch vulnerable code. Managed Rulesets are tuned against massive, diverse traffic to reduce false positives, and the WAF is fully manageable via API to fit into CI/CD workflows. Additional capabilities include virtual patching for CVEs, inline malware gateway support for file-upload content scanning (exposing cf.waf.content_scan.* fields for downstream action), automated security updates, and integration with other Cloudflare products like Bot Management and DDoS protection. Enterprises, including large retailers like Carrefour, have consolidated multiple tools behind Cloudflare WAF to reduce incident resolution time and simplify security operations.