Editor’s Note: This is the second in a series of posts on the advantages of a Shift Left approach to security.
You’ve done everything right. You’ve implemented IAST, your developers are fixing bugs faster than ever, and your code is clean. But you deploy to production, and the next day, a new zero-day vulnerability like Log4Shell is announced. Your entire application portfolio is suddenly at risk.
This is where traditional defenses fail. A Web Application Firewall (WAF) might block some known attack patterns, but it lacks the context to stop novel or obfuscated exploits. This is where Runtime Application Self-Protection (RASP) becomes your most critical asset.
The Waratek RASP Advantage: Control, Not Signatures
While other security tools rely on pattern-matching signatures that constantly need updating, Waratek RASP focuses on rules and techniques.
- Zero-Day Defense: Waratek RASP neutralizes entire classes of vulnerabilities. For example, it understands what a legitimate SQL query looks like. When an attacker attempts a SQL Injection, RASP doesn’t need a signature for that specific attack; it sees the application attempting to execute a malicious command and terminates only the offending process in real-time, with no impact on legitimate users.
- Prevents Business Logic Abuse: These tools can identify when an application’s features are being used in unintended and malicious ways, something that is nearly impossible to detect with traditional defenses.
- Virtual Patching: Found a critical vulnerability in a legacy application that can’t be taken down for a patch? Waratek RASP allows you to apply a “virtual patch” instantly without restarting the app. You can create a rule that says, “Do not allow any user input to be processed by the vulnerable Log4j class.” The vulnerability still exists in the source code, but it is rendered completely un-exploitable in production. This keeps you in compliance and buys you invaluable time to patch source code later without business disruption.
- Precision and Performance: Because it lives inside the application, Waratek RASP provides precise forensic information. There are no vague WAF alerts to chase. You get a precise report: “Attack blocked, user X, targeting this specific line of code.” All this is achieved with negligible performance impact.
While IAST helps you build clean code, Waratek RASP ensures that no matter what code is running in production—old, new, or vulnerable—it behaves securely. In our next post, we’ll explore how these two tools create an unbreakable defense-in-depth strategy.
Click to request a demo of Waratek’s RASP solution. To learn about the upcoming release of Waratek IAST, click here.
