WAF Managed Rules
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.
Cloudflare provides the following managed rulesets in the WAF:
-
Cloudflare Managed Ruleset: Created by the Cloudflare security team, this ruleset provides fast and effective protection for all of your applications. The ruleset is updated frequently to cover new vulnerabilities and reduce false positives.
Ruleset ID:...376e9aee -
Cloudflare OWASP Core Ruleset: Cloudflare’s implementation of the Open Web Application Security Project, or OWASP ModSecurity Core Rule Set. Cloudflare routinely monitors for updates from OWASP based on the latest version available from the official code repository.
Ruleset ID:...c25d2f1f -
Cloudflare Exposed Credentials Check: Deploy an automated credentials check on your end-user authentication endpoints. For any credential pair, the Cloudflare WAF performs a lookup against a public database of stolen credentials.
Ruleset ID:...14069605 -
Cloudflare Free Managed Ruleset: Available on all Cloudflare plans. Designed to provide mitigation against high and wide impacting vulnerabilities. The rules are safe to deploy on most applications. If you deployed the Cloudflare Managed Ruleset for your site, you do not need to deploy this managed ruleset.
Ruleset ID:...dfb893ba
The following managed rulesets run in a response phase:
- Cloudflare Sensitive Data Detection: Created by Cloudflare to address common data loss threats. These rules monitor the download of specific sensitive data — for example, financial and personally identifiable information. Available in Security > Sensitive Data.
Ruleset ID:...499d988e
The managed rulesets you can deploy depend on your Cloudflare plan.
| Free | Pro | Business | Enterprise | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
Availability | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
Free Managed Ruleset | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
Cloudflare Managed Ruleset | No | Yes | Yes | Yes |
Cloudflare OWASP Core Ruleset | No | Yes | Yes | Yes |
Cloudflare Exposed Credentials Check | No | Yes | Yes | Yes |
Cloudflare Sensitive Data Detection | No | No | No | Yes |
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.
At the zone level, you can only deploy each WAF managed ruleset once. At the account level you can deploy each managed ruleset multiple times.
Cloudflare analyzes the body of incoming requests up to a certain maximum size that varies according to your Cloudflare plan. For Enterprise customers, the maximum body size is 128 KB, while for other plans the limit is lower. This means that the behavior of specific managed rules that analyze request bodies can vary according to your current Cloudflare plan.