Managed rulesets

Note

This feature requires an Enterprise plan with a paid add-on.

The Cloudflare WAF includes pre-configured managed rulesets that you can deploy. These managed rulesets provide immediate protection against:

• Zero-day vulnerabilities
• Top-10 attack techniques
• Use of stolen/leaked credentials
• Extraction of sensitive data

The WAF’s managed rulesets are regularly updated. Each rule has a default action that varies according to the severity of the rule. You can adjust the behavior of specific rules, choosing from several possible actions.

Rules of managed rulesets have associated tags (such as wordpress) that allow you to search for a specific group of rules and configure them in bulk.

Account-level deployment

At the account level, you can deploy each WAF managed ruleset more than once. This means that you can apply the same managed ruleset with different configurations to different subsets of incoming traffic for the Enterprise zones in your account.

For example, you could deploy the Cloudflare OWASP Core Ruleset multiple times with different paranoia levels and a different action (Managed Challenge action for PL3 and Log action for PL4).

Example: Deploy OWASP with two different configurations

The following example deploys the Cloudflare OWASP Core Ruleset multiple times at the account level through the following execute rules:

• First execute rule: Enable OWASP rules up to paranoia level 3 (PL3) and set the action to Managed Challenge.
• Second execute rule: Enable OWASP rules up to PL4 and set the action to Log.

This configuration gives you additional protection by enabling PL3 rules, but without blocking the requests, since higher paranoia levels are more prone to false positives.

The second rule logs any matches for PL4 rules, the most strict set of rules in the ruleset, so that it does not affect live traffic. You could use this configuration to understand which traffic would be affected by PL4 rules.

Dashboard

1. Deploy the Cloudflare OWASP Core Ruleset by following the dashboard instructions, customizing the ruleset behavior using these settings:

   • OWASP Anomaly Score Threshold: Medium - 40 and higher
   • OWASP Paranoia Level: PL3
   • OWASP Action: Managed Challenge

2. Select Deploy.

3. Repeat the deployment procedure for the OWASP ruleset, but with following ruleset configuration:

   • OWASP Anomaly Score Threshold: Medium - 40 and higher
   • OWASP Paranoia Level: PL4
   • OWASP Action: Log

Once you finish your configuration, the Deployed managed rulesets list will show two Execute rules for the Cloudflare OWASP Core Ruleset.

API

The following POST request for the Create an account ruleset operation creates an entry point ruleset for the http_request_firewall_managed phase at the account level. The ruleset includes two rules deploying the Cloudflare OWASP Core Ruleset twice with different configurations.

curl "https://api.cloudflare.com/client/v4/accounts/{account_id}/rulesets" \
--header "Authorization: Bearer <API_TOKEN>" \
--header "Content-Type: application/json" \
--data '{
  "name": "My ruleset",
  "description": "Entry point ruleset for WAF managed rulesets (account)",
  "kind": "root",
  "phase": "http_request_firewall_managed",
  "rules": [
    {
      "action": "execute",
      "action_parameters": {
        "id": "4814384a9e5d4991b9815dcfc25d2f1f",
        "overrides": {
          "categories": [
            {
              "category": "paranoia-level-4",
              "enabled": false
            }
          ],
          "rules": [
            {
              "id": "6179ae15870a4bb7b2d480d4843b323c",
              "action": "managed_challenge"
            }
          ]
        }
      },
      "expression": "cf.zone.plan eq \"ENT\"",
      "description": "Execute OWASP ruleset at PL3 with Managed Challenge action"
    },
    {
      "action": "execute",
      "action_parameters": {
        "id": "4814384a9e5d4991b9815dcfc25d2f1f",
        "overrides": {
          "rules": [
            {
              "id": "6179ae15870a4bb7b2d480d4843b323c",
              "action": "log"
            }
          ]
        }
      },
      "expression": "cf.zone.plan eq \"ENT\"",
      "description": "Execute OWASP ruleset at PL4 with Log action"
    }
  ]
}'

Customize the behavior of managed rulesets

To customize the behavior of managed rulesets, do one of the following:

• Create exceptions to skip the execution of WAF managed rulesets or some of their rules under certain conditions.
• Configure overrides to change the rule action or disable one or more rules of managed rulesets. Overrides can affect an entire managed ruleset, specific tags, or specific rules in the managed ruleset.

Exceptions have priority over overrides.

Important

Ruleset overrides and tag overrides apply to both existing and future rules in the managed ruleset. If you want to override existing rules only, you must use rule overrides.