A company has implemented IAM WAF and Amazon CloudFront for an application. The application runs on Amazon EC2 instances that are part of an Auto Scaling group. The Auto Scaling group is behind an Application Load Balancer (ALB).
The IAM WAF web ACL uses an IAM Managed Rules rule group and is associated with the CloudFront distribution. CloudFront receives the request from IAM WAF and then uses the ALB as the distribution's origin.
During a security review, a security engineer discovers that the infrastructure is susceptible to a large, layer 7 DDoS attack.
How can the security engineer improve the security at the edge of the solution to defend against this type of attack?
- Configure the CloudFront distribution to use the Lambda@Edge feature. Create an IAM Lambda function that imposes a rate limit on CloudFront viewer requests. Block the request if the rate limit is exceeded.
- Configure the IAM WAF web ACL so that the web ACL has more capacity units to process all IAM WAF rules faster.
- Configure IAM WAF with a rate-based rule that imposes a rate limit that automatically blocks requests when the rate limit is exceeded.
- Configure the CloudFront distribution to use IAM WAF as its origin instead of the ALB.
Answer(s): C
Explanation:
To improve the security at the edge of the solution to defend against a large, layer 7 DDoS attack, the security engineer should do the following:
Configure AWS WAF with a rate-based rule that imposes a rate limit that automatically blocks requests when the rate limit is exceeded. This allows the security engineer to use a rule that tracks the number of requests from a single IP address and blocks subsequent requests if they exceed a specified threshold within a specified time period.
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