How to Use Akamai's WAF with Appdome MobileBOT™ Defense

Introduction

Using Akamai’s API Gateway with Appdome’s MobileBOT™ Defense solution offers app developers a streamlined approach to protect backend APIs against malicious bots and botnets, credential stuffing attacks, DDoS, invalid traffic, and other automated attacks. In this guide, you’ll learn how to integrate Appdome’s Docker Image with Akamai’s API Gateway.

Before delving into the steps, let’s understand some of the terms used:

MTLS (Mutual Transport Layer Security): Mutual TLS (mTLS) is a method for mutual authentication in which both parties in a network connection validate the SSL certificates presented by each other against a trusted root Certificate Authority (CA) certificate.

Client Certificate: In cryptography, a client certificate is a type of digital certificate used by client systems to make authenticated requests to a remote server.

Safe Session: Represents sessions that are determined to be secure or not at risk of any threat.

At-Risk Session: Represents sessions that are potentially under threat or have detected anomalies.

Header Payload: The data transferred in the header of HTTP requests or responses. Protecting this data ensures that it cannot be tampered with during transit.

Prerequisites for Using Akamai API Gateway & Appdome Docker Image

For utilizing Appdome MobileBOT™ Defense with Akamai, you’ll need the following:

• An Akamai account with admin permissions
• An Android or iOS app secured by Appdome MobileBOT™ Defense
• An Appdome MobileBOT™ Defense License

Getting Started with Akamai API Gateway

Note: For any additional information, please refer to Akamai’s documentation on how to Set up an API configuration from scratch.

1. Add permissions to a user role.
   • See the Akamai guide on how to add permissions to a user role
2. Create a property
   • Learn how to create a property
3. Configure your property’s hostname settings.
   • Refer to Akamai’s documentation on Configure property hostname settings
4. Add API Gateway to your product.
   • To add the API Gateway to your product, see this guide.
     IMPORTANT: Configuring the mTLS is only necessary if you have enabled mTLS in the Appdome fuse process. Otherwise, skip ahead to the section “Configure Appdome’s Docker Image.”
5. Mutual Authentication
   •  To enable mTLS, refer to the documentation on Mutual Authentication.
     The following screenshots can serve as a guide for showing the sample Property and Mutual Authentication configurations for mTLS.

• • Property Configuration:

• • Mutual Authentication Configuration: 

• • • • At this point, everything on the Akamai side is ready. You can now set up your GCP, Azure, AWS server, or any cloud provider of your choice.
        Links to Dedicated KBs:
        • GCP: For setting up a server on Google Cloud Platform and configuring it with Appdome’s Docker Image, follow this guide.
        • Azure: To set up a server on Microsoft Azure and configure it with Appdome’s Docker Image, follow this guide.
        • AWS: For setting up a server on Amazon Web Services and configuring it with Appdome’s Docker Image, follow this guide.

To learn more, see the installation instructions for Installing Docker Engine on Ubuntu

Configure Appdome’s Docker Image

Appdome’s Docker Image is a custom solution to secure apps built on the Appdome platform with the Anti-Bot service enabled. This service functions within a Docker container based on Nginx. To facilitate its operation, users must supply an SSL certificate, config files and keys, and designated environment variables.

Prerequisites: Familiarity with Docker and UNIX-based machines is beneficial.

How Does It Work?

Based on Nginx and Lua, the service employs the Lua module to decrypt the payload and validate the signature, then it proxies the request to the target route as specified in the config file.

The module can be used with either the built-in LRU cache or with Redis, but it is recommended to use the built-in LRU to reduce the overhead of making the calls to Redis and ease the setup. If working in a cluster, it is necessary to use Redis to share storage across multiple instances.

Setup

The following environment variables are required to set up the service.

1. Receive the JSON config file

• Obtain the JSON config file from our Appdome support team. The files will be named after the taskID of that build. There may be multiple files, each corresponding to different tasks.

2. Modify the JSON config file

• Add the following fields:
  • key: The filename of the key that is relative to the /home folder in your docker container used for validation.
  • target: The endpoint to which requests are forwarded. Make sure your DNS resolver resolves this address.
  • heartbeat_validity (optional): Time in seconds for how long the heartbeat remains valid.

Example

[{

"key": "keys/your_key_file.key",

"target": "http://target_address",

"heartbeat_validity": 60

...

}]

3. Prepare the Docker Container:
– Ensure your Docker container has the necessary directories (`/home/configs` and `/home/keys`).

• Configs Directory: This directory will store JSON files containing mobile anti-bot configurations provided by Appdome.
• Keys Directory: This directory will store private keys used to validate the headers sent by Appdome.

Note: Ensure Key Matches. Verify that the key specified in the JSON config file correctly points to a key file located in the `/home/keys` directory within the Docker container.

Note: If you want to use only one config file for multiple task_ids for testing, rename the config file to default.json file and set the environment variable USE_DEFAULT=true. This setup is useful for initial testing but is not recommended for production if you regularly change the Anti-bot configuration.

4. Mount the JSON config file to the Docker Container

• Use the `docker run` command with the `-v` option to bind mount the host directories to the container directories.

By following these steps, you’ll be able to correctly set up and mount the JSON config file to your Appdome Docker container.

Optional: How to Configure SSL & mTLS

How to run Appdome Docker Image

Connect to your VM, and run the following commands:

• • Pull the docker image from our public repository:

    docker pull public.ecr.aws/n2i7f1e2/appdome-waf:1.0.6

• • Run the docker image with the following command:

    docker run -p 443:443 -p 80:80 -d \
    -v "$(pwd)"/certs:/etc/nginx/certs \
    -v "$(pwd)"/keys:/home/keys \
    -v "$(pwd)"/configs:/home/configs \
    -e REDIS=<redis address> \
    -e PASSTHROUGH=false \
    -e RESOLVER=<resolver address> \
    -e SSL_ON=true \
    -e MTLS_ON=true \
    -e FINGERPRINTS=asd, zxc, qwe \
    -e LOG_LEVEL=debug \
    --restart unless-stopped \
    public.ecr.aws/n2i7f1e2/appdome-waf:1.0.6

At this point, you have a machine that will run the Appdome Docker Image. Make sure that your application traffic is routing correctly to the Appdome Docker Image and that the Appdome Docker Image is passing the traffic correctly to the target.

Monitoring Docker Health

To ensure your Docker container is operational, it is important to configure a health check endpoint within your system’s monitoring tools. Set up an endpoint in your health monitoring system to regularly check the /_health endpoint of the Docker container. This setup helps confirm that the Docker container is running correctly and is responsive. You can use any system that supports health checks, ensuring it aligns with your deployment environment and monitoring needs.

Note: The health check only verifies that the docker is up and running, but it does not verify that the target is accessible. If you want to make sure that the connectivity between the reverse proxy and the target is working as expected, configure an additional health check that monitors the target connectivity.

Conclusion

By integrating Akamai with your preferred Virtual Server and using Appdome’s MobileBOT™ Defense, you can protect your backend APIs against malicious bots and enhance the security of mobile apps. By mastering and implementing the configurations mentioned above, businesses can safeguard and optimize their mobile app traffic.

Related Articles:

• MobileBOT™ Defense
• Using F5 WAF with Appdome MobileBOT™ Defense
• How to Secure Android & iOS Apps in Azure DevOps Pipelines
• Using Cloudflare WAF with Appdome MobileBOT™ Defense

How Do I Learn More?

If you have any questions, please send them our way at support.appdome.com or via the chat window on the Appdome platform.

Thank you!

Thanks for visiting Appdome! Our mission is to secure every app on the planet by making mobile app defense easy. We hope we’re living up to the mission with your project. If you don’t already have an account, you can sign up for free.