Google Cloud Armor helps you protect your Trusted Cloud by S3NS deployments from multiple types of threats, including distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks and application attacks like cross-site scripting (XSS) and SQL injection (SQLi). Cloud Armor features some automatic protections and some that you need to configure manually. This document provides a high-level overview of these features, several of which are only available for global external Application Load Balancers and classic Application Load Balancers.
Security policies
Use Cloud Armor security policies to protect applications running behind a load balancer from distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) and other web-based attacks, whether the applications are deployed on Trusted Cloud by S3NS, in a hybrid deployment, or in a multi-cloud architecture. Security policies can be configured manually, with configurable match conditions and actions in a security policy. Cloud Armor also features preconfigured security policies, which cover a variety of use cases. For more information, see Cloud Armor security policy overview.
Rules language
Cloud Armor lets you define prioritized rules with configurable match conditions and actions in a security policy. A rule takes effect, meaning that the configured action is applied, if the rule is the highest priority rule whose attributes match the attributes of the incoming request. For more information, see Cloud Armor custom rules language reference.
Preconfigured WAF rules
Google Cloud Armor preconfigured WAF rules are complex web application firewall (WAF) rules with dozens of signatures that are compiled from open source industry standards. Each signature corresponds to an attack detection rule in the rule set. Google offers these rules as-is. The rules allow Cloud Armor to evaluate dozens of distinct traffic signatures by referring to conveniently named rules, rather than requiring you to define each signature manually.
Cloud Armor preconfigured rules help protect your web applications and services from common attacks from the internet and help mitigate the OWASP Top 10 risks. The rule source is OWASP Core Rule Set 3.3.2 (CRS).
These preconfigured rules can be tuned to disable noisy or otherwise unnecessary signatures. For more information, see Tuning Cloud Armor WAF rules.
How Cloud Armor works
Cloud Armor provides always-on DDoS protection against network or protocol-based volumetric DDoS attacks. This protection is for applications or services behind load balancers. It is able to detect and mitigate network attacks in order to allow only well-formed requests through the load balancing proxies. The security policies enforce custom Layer 7 filtering policies, including pre-configured WAF rules that mitigate OWASP top 10 web application vulnerability risks. You can attach security policies to the backend services of regional external Application Load Balancers.Cloud Armor security policies enable you to allow or deny access to your deployment at the Trusted Cloud edge, as close as possible to the source of incoming traffic. This prevents unwelcome traffic from consuming resources or entering your Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) networks.
You can use some or all of these features to protect your application. You can use security policies to match against known conditions, and create WAF rules to protect against common attacks like those found in the ModSecurity Core Rule Set 3.3.2.