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 that is used by client systems to make authenticated requests to a remote server.

Safe Session: Represents sessions that are determined to be safe 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.
   • For adding the API Gateway to your product, check this guide.
     IMPORTANT: It is only necessary to configure the mTLS if you have enabled mTLS in the Appdome fuse process. Otherwise, skip ahead to the section “Configure Appdome’s Docker Image“
5. Mutual Authentication
   •  For enabling mTLS, refer to the documentation on Mutual Authentication.
     The following screenshots can serve as a guide, however. The screenshots show 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 or 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: For setting up a server on Microsoft Azure and configuring 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.

Configs: Located in /home/configs, this folder contains JSON files. The name of the file is task_id, as built on Appdome and the content of the file is a JSON array of the mobile anti bot configuration as provided by Appdome.

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:1.0.0

• • 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:1.0.0

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.

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 aforementioned configurations, 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

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.