BACKGROUND

The disclosure generally relates to electric digital data processing and to security arrangements for protecting computers, components thereof, programs or data against unauthorized activity.

Attacks which target application layer processes are referred to as application layer attacks. Application programming interfaces (APIs), for instance, are a common attack vector for carrying out application layer attacks against applications. To protect an application against application layer attacks, the application and its API can be secured through deployment of an application firewall, or in the case of web applications, a web application firewall (WAF). WAFs provide applications with protection against application layer attacks which exploit vulnerabilities. For instance, a WAF deployed in front of a web application can enforce rules for blocking inbound Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) traffic. For web applications running in a cloud environment, cloud-based WAFs can be deployed for protection against application layer attacks. Cloud applications differ from traditional software applications in that the applications are hosted in the cloud rather than locally and can be accessed via the Internet. Due to the growing trend towards cloud computing, applications are commonly developed to be cloud native, or designed to be run in a cloud environment. Cloud native applications, which can be composed of loosely coupled services/microservices, are containerized applications designed for deployment to nodes of a cloud cluster on which the application will run.

