Enable secure access to applications with Cloudflare WAF and Azure Active Directory

Cloudflare and Microsoft Azure Active Directory have partnered to provide an integration specifically for web applications using Azure Active Directory B2C. From today, customers using both services can follow the simple integration steps to protect B2C applications with Cloudflare’s Web Application Firewall (WAF) on any custom domain. Microsoft has detailed this integration as well.

The Web Application Firewall (WAF) is a core component of the Cloudflare platform and is designed to keep any web application safe. It blocks more than 70 billion cyber threats per day. That is 810,000 threats blocked every second.

The WAF is available through an intuitive dashboard or a Terraform integration, and it enables users to build powerful rules. Every request to the WAF is inspected against the rule engine and the threat intelligence built from protecting approximately 25 million internet properties. Suspicious requests can be blocked, challenged or logged as per the needs of the user, while legitimate requests are routed to the destination regardless of where the application lives (i.e., on-premise or in the cloud). Analytics and Cloudflare Logs enable users to view actionable metrics.

The Cloudflare WAF is an intelligent, integrated, and scalable solution to protect business-critical web applications from malicious attacks, with no changes to customers' existing infrastructure.

Azure AD B2C is a customer identity management service that enables custom control of how your customers sign up, sign in, and manage their profiles when using iOS, Android, .NET, single-page (SPA), and other applications and web experiences. It uses standards-based authentication protocols including OpenID Connect, OAuth 2.0, and SAML. You can customize the entire user experience with your brand so that it blends seamlessly with your web and mobile applications. It integrates with most modern applications and commercial off-the-shelf software, providing business-to-customer identity as a service. Customers of businesses of all sizes use their preferred social, enterprise, or local account identities to get single sign-on access to their applications and APIs. It takes care of the scaling and safety of the authentication platform, monitoring and automatically handling threats like denial-of-service, password spray, or brute force attacks.

When setting up Azure AD B2C, many customers prefer to customize their authentication endpoint by hosting the solution under their own domain — for example, under store.example.com — rather than using a Microsoft owned domain. With the new partnership and integration, customers can now place the custom domain behind Cloudflare’s Web Application Firewall while also using Azure AD B2C, further protecting the identity service from sophisticated attacks.

This defense-in-depth approach allows customers to leverage both Cloudflare WAF capabilities along with Azure AD B2C native Identity Protection features to defend against cyberattacks.

Instructions on how to set up the integration are provided on the Azure website and all it requires is a Cloudflare account.

Azure customers need support for a strong set of security and performance tools once they implement Azure AD B2C in their environment. Integrating Cloudflare Web Application Firewall with Azure AD B2C can provide customers the ability to write custom security rules (including rate limiting rules), DDoS mitigation, and deploy advanced bot management features. The Cloudflare WAF works by proxying and inspecting traffic towards your application and analyzing the payloads to ensure only non-malicious content reaches your origin servers. By incorporating the Cloudflare integration into Azure AD B2C, customers can ensure that their application is protected against sophisticated attack vectors including zero-day vulnerabilities, malicious automated botnets, and other generic attacks such as those listed in the OWASP Top 10.

This integration is a great match for any B2C businesses that are looking to enable their customers to authenticate themselves in the easiest and most secure way possible.

Please give it a try and let us know how we can improve it. Reach out to us for other use cases for your applications on Azure. Register here for expressing your interest/feedback on Azure integration and for upcoming webinars on this topic.