Real-time bot protection for F5 iRules

Are you wondering how to add efficient bot protection to your F5 equipment? Look no further!

It’s a point of pride for DataDome that our bot protection technology should integrate seamlessly with our customers’ web infrastructure, without requiring any changes to the architecture. As a consequence, we aim to provide server-side modules that are optimized for a wide range of different setups—including F5 iRules.

Our F5 iRules module offers powerful bot protection functionalities, and protects all your customer critical touchpoints with specific algorithms for websites, web APIs, mobile app APIs, login sections, etc.

The module enables you to install the DataDome bot protection solution as close to the users as possible in your infrastructure.

Like our other server-side modules, the F5 iRules module is also extremely easy to install. You don’t need to touch the command line, everything happens in your F5 admin console.

How F5 Bot Protection works and is it enough?

In addition to its WAF capabilities, F5 also offers two integrated bot protection features called Proactive Bot Defense and Bot Signature Checking. Proactive Bot Defense uses JavaScript to evaluate bot signatures and determine whether browsers visiting your web site are legitimate, while Bot Signature Checking parses the user-agent string in the HTTP header and performs a reverse DNS lookup to define the bot as either legitimate or malicious.

While these features provide some level of protection against DoS attacks, they’re powerless against scraper bots and hackers using tools such as Chrome Headless, which enable almost perfect rendering and mimic legitimate user traffic extremely convincingly.

That’s why you need a specialized bot protection solution on top of F5: only a solution with truly expert bot detection capabilities is able to identify and block even the most sophisticated bots.

Luckily, F5 offers the flexibility to integrate such a solution in a very elegant and efficient manner, thanks to the F5 iRules engine. iRules is a Tcl-based scripting language which allows complete programmatic access to application traffic in real time—ideal for solutions like DataDome.

When the DataDome module has been installed, every HTTP request to one of your applications will trigger an event which processes the DataDome logic in front of the iRules engine. The module makes a call to the DataDome endpoint, and depending on the API response, the module either blocks the request or lets the regular process continue.

This means that once the DataDome module has been installed on any F5 equipment in your setup, your entire infrastructure behind that piece of equipment is protected against bot traffic.

Getting started

To start testing DataDome with F5 iRules today, click the Free trial button below and create your account (it takes less than a minute).

Then, follow the F5 iRule module installation instructions in our technical documentation. The whole process shouldn’t take more than 10 minutes, and you don’t need a credit card.

That’s it! You can now access your personal DataDome dashboard, and observe all bot traffic to all your vulnerability endpoints in real time.