Configuring a per-site WAF policy with IP address restriction rules: Part one

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I recently worked with a client who had multiple public-facing Internet Information Services (IIS) websites hosted on an Azure® virtual machine (VM). The client wanted to restrict inbound internet access to one specific website by specifying a set of allowed external IP addresses and leave the traffic flow for the other websites unaffected.

Introduction

A common approach to achieve this is to use an Application Gateway web application firewall (WAF) in front of the target VM. Then, create a per-site WAF policy with an IP-based access control rule and assign it to the Application Gateway and the listener that corresponds to the particular website’s hostname.

An IP–based access control rule is a custom WAF rule that lets you control access to your web applications. It does this by specifying a list of IP addresses or IP address ranges in Classless Inter-Domain Routing (CIDR) format.

By assigning WAF policies to a listener, you can configure WAF settings for individual sites without the changes affecting every site. The most specific policy takes precedence. Suppose there is a global policy and a per-site policy (a WAF policy associated with a listener). In that case, the per-site policy overrides the global WAF policy for that listener. Other listeners without their own policies are affected by only the global WAF policy.

In this series of posts, I run through a simplified configuration to demonstrate how to apply a per-site WAF policy to an Application Gateway to control inbound access based on IP-based restrictions to one of two test IIS websites running on a single Windows VM.

The following diagram provides a conceptual illustration of my goal:

Implementation walkthrough

This three-post series covers the following elements of the implementation walkthrough:

Post 1:

1. Introduction
2. Assumptions

Post 2:

Application Gateway configuration:

1. Web application firewall
2. Backend pool
3. HTTP settings
4. Frontend IP configurations
5. Listeners
6. Rules

Post 3:

1. WAF policy configuration
2. Testing the custom rule
3. Conclusion

Assumptions

The following items are already in place, so I won’t cover the provisioning steps for these items in this walkthrough:

• A Windows® Azure VM
• IIS installed and bindings configured for two test website URLs (site1.hiteshvadgama.co.uk and site2.hiteshvadgama.co.uk)
• An Application Gateway WAF (v2)
• DNS records updated to map website domains to the public IP address of the Application Gateway

Next steps

Post 2 in this series covers the Application Gateway configuration.

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