Manual Chapter : Adding Server Technologies to a Policy

Applies To:

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BIG-IP ASM

  • 13.1.5, 13.1.4, 13.1.3, 13.1.1, 13.1.0
Manual Chapter

Overview: Adding server technologies to a policy

It is not always easy to determine which server technologies apply to the applications for which you are creating security policies. Server technologies can be server-side applications, frameworks, programs, web servers, operating systems, and so on, and they are associated with one or more sets of attack signatures that can be added to the policy. This allows you to assign a more selective set of attack signatures to the policy, that is, signatures that specifically apply to the technologies used in the application being protected.

When you first create a security policy, you have the opportunity to select server technologies that you know about. Once the policy is created, you can have it automatically detect server technologies. In this case, the policy can detect appropriate server technologies, and can continue to detect new server technologies if the back-end server infrastructure changes, if new systems are added, or if an attack signature update adds a new server technology that is appropriate for the policy.

The system can automatically detect the server technology on Request headers and payloads only when a successful response code is received (1xx/2xx/3xx). For Responses, server technology can be detected only if "Content-Type" header is in the response. The system also learns technologies from error responses, such as 4xx and 5xx status codes (even if they are not listed in the HTTP Response Status Codes used to learn traffic in the Learning and Blocking Settings).

You can also manually add server technologies to the policy if you determine that certain ones are appropriate for the applications being protected and want to apply them right away.

Automatically adding server technologies

A security policy can automatically detect the server technologies that the applications it protects are using. You can also view a list of server technologies and add them manually.
  1. On the Main tab, click Security > Application Security > Policy Building > Learning and Blocking Settings .
    The Learning and Blocking Settings screen opens.
  2. In the Policy Building Settings area, expand Server Technologies and select Enable Server Technology Detection.
  3. Click Save to save your settings.
  4. Click the arrow next to Enable Server Technology Detection.
    The Policy: Server Technologies screen opens where you can see which server technologies are applied to the current security policy.
  5. Click Add Server Technology to see the server technologies that are discoverable, and select any that you know apply to the applications being protected, and click Save.
    If manually adding a server technology that has implied technologies, you see a notification that lists the additional server technologies that will be added. For example, if you add ASP.NET, IIS and Microsoft Windows are also included.
  6. In the editing context area, click Apply Policy to put the changes into effect.
The security policy is set up to automatically detect server technologies and make suggestions to add them to the policy. If using automatic learning, the system adds the detected technologies when sufficient time and traffic has passed. If the Learning Mode is Manual, you need to specifically accept the learning suggestions to add the sever technologies on the Traffic Learning screen.

When server technologies are included in the policy, the system creates a user-defined signature set for each server technology. If the technology has related or implied server technologies, they are added as well. The signature sets are added to the security policy with the Learn, Alarm, Block flags set, and new signatures are put into staging. The system learns server technologies from responses regardless of the Learn from response flag setting in the Learning and Blocking Settings .

If you later delete server technologies and want to delete the associated user-defined signature sets, you can go to Options > Application Security > Attack Signatures > Attack Signature Sets and delete the sets there. Deleting the user-defined signature sets alone, however, does not remove the server technology from the list.