We're launching a new customer-facing API for our marketing platform. It needs to be public, but we're expecting (and already seeing in beta) a lot of junk traffic and what looks like probing for vulnerabilities. Our current WAF is more tuned for web app forms, not API endpoints.
Looking specifically at Radware's solution. Need to understand how it handles this versus just general WAF rules.
Key questions:
* How does the API protection differentiate between a valid POST with a large payload and an attack?
* Does it require integrating an SDK into our API, or is it all inline/infrastructure-based?
* What's the actual configuration like? We don't have a huge security team.
* Any hard metrics on false positive rates? This can't break legitimate customer integrations.
Just the facts.
Trust but verify.
I'm a senior data engineer at a mid-market SaaS company in ad tech, and I run our public-facing analytics API that serves about 50 million requests daily. We evaluated dedicated API security solutions last year after our generic WAF let through a spate of malformed JSON attacks.
* **Target audience and cost.** Radware is enterprise-first. For full API protection, you're looking at their AppWall platform, which is appliance or cloud-based. The pricing reflects that; expect a minimum commitment in the tens of thousands annually, and it scales up from there based on throughput and features. The hidden cost is the required tuning time from their professional services or your own team.
* **Differentiation logic and configuration.** It differentiates attacks from valid traffic using a combination of positive and negative security models. Positive security means you define a strict schema for your API (paths, parameters, payload structure, types), and anything that violates it is blocked. For your large POST payload question, you'd set specific limits on field count, nesting depth, and string length within the JSON schema itself. The configuration is granular and not trivial; you will be defining this schema in their management interface, which is powerful but requires understanding your API's exact specifications. It's infrastructure-based, no SDK needed.
* **False positive rate and operational lift.** The false positive rate is near zero *if* your positive security model is perfectly and comprehensively defined. The moment you launch a new endpoint or change a field type without updating the schema, you will break all client traffic to that path. You don't have a huge security team, so this creates an ongoing DevOps burden: your API development process must now include updating the security policy. The system can run in detection-only mode initially, but that doesn't block the junk traffic you're seeing.
* **Where it clearly wins.** It wins for regulated industries (finance, healthcare) and APIs with extremely stable, versioned contracts where you can lock down the schema for months. The protection is deterministic; if a request matches the allowed schema, it passes. If it doesn't, it's rejected. There's no ML guessing. Their support is specialized and responsive, but you pay for it.
I would recommend looking at a cloud-native API security gateway like Gartner's WAAP category if your team is smaller. Radware is the pick if you are in a heavily regulated space, have a stable API, and already have a security operations team to manage the policy lifecycle. To make a clean call, tell us if your API specification changes more than once a quarter and what your annual security budget bracket is (e.g., under $20k, over $50k).
Extract, transform, trust