Private App Security enables you to defend your web assets against a range of threats
while maintaining optimal performance and user experience within your Prisma Access
environment.
Private App Security for Prisma Access integrates comprehensive security features
directly into your existing Prisma Access infrastructure, solving the challenge of
fragmented and ineffective web application protection for your private applications.
Administrators can enable Private App Security, define or discover applications to
protect, and configure security policies.
What Is Private App Security?
It's a common practice for customers to deploy standalone WAF or WAAP
products alongside their SASE solutions to safeguard Enterprise applications from
application-specific attacks that aim to disrupt the application or manipulate its
behavior for the attacker's advantage. Although this approach has been effective in
the past, it presents several significant challenges in today's environment:
Enterprise applications evolve rapidly, causing WAF and WAAP products to become
outdated quickly unless there is a substantial investment in their
maintenance.
Updates to existing applications, often occurring every few days with the
introduction of new domains and APIs along with the deployment of new
applications, aren't always effectively handled by current WAF and WAAP
solutions. This oversight increases enterprise risk over time.
Private Enterprise applications often are hosted across a combination of cloud
service providers and physical data centers, resulting in a mix of WAF and WAAP
solutions that are complex to manage and vary in effectiveness. This fragmented
approach leads to higher operational costs, adds unnecessary complexity for IT
teams, and raises the likelihood of misconfigurations.
Application attacks have evolved to target specific applications, including Day
0 attacks that exploit vulnerabilities in application logic. The traditional
rule-based approach of current WAF and WAAP solutions proves ineffective against
these sophisticated attacks.
Private App Security in Prisma Access provides comprehensive protection for your web
applications and APIs by integrating advanced security functionalities directly into
your existing Prisma Access infrastructure. In addition to essential WAF
capabilities such as OWASP Top 10 Protection, DDoS Rate Limiters, Geo-fencing, and
customizable policies, Private App Security presents key advantages that can
significantly enhance your application security posture:
It identifies private applications and domains actively accessed within
environments not covered by existing Private App Security policies. For
protected applications, Private App Security recognizes usage changes and
generates policy recommendations, along with historical reports to assess the
impact of these recommendations and uphold a strong security stance over
time.
It enables the centralization of all WAF and WAAP protections in a unified
solution integrated with other security components, regardless of the current or
future placement of applications.
Through intelligent behavioral analysis, it automatically constructs an
application fingerprint for each protected application based on its typical
usage patterns. This enables the system to detect any deviations in application
requests, including Day 0 attacks and application logic threats that might evade
detection by static rule sets.
The Private App Security solution integrates with App Acceleration to enhance
performance without compromising security, addressing a common challenge faced by
traditional WAF and WAAP solutions. This feature safeguards private applications
accessed through various Prisma Access connection methods, including service
connections, ZTNA connectors, or Colo-Connect.
The following image provides an overview of the Private App Security
architecture.
