Point solutions leave blind spots.
Three reasons teams move application and API security to Harness WAAP.
WAF, bot protection, API security, and DDoS mitigation from multiple vendors using disconnected policies and interfaces.
Harness WAAP unifies WAF, bot protection, AI security, and API security in a single platform with one interface.
Security tests lack business context, generate low quality results, and create toil as active threats go unchecked.
Harness WAAP continuously tests and monitors running applications, surfacing threats before attackers exploit them.
Legacy tools protect only what they know about, leaving shadow and exposed APIs invisible until attackers find them.
Harness WAAP auto-discovers all APIs, evaluates security posture and applies runtime protection instantly.
Discover. Test. Protect.
Automatic API Discovery. AI continuously maps your API landscape, discovering unknown endpoints and sensitive data flows before attackers do.
Intelligent Threat Detection. Detects advanced attack patterns like data exfiltration and business logic exploitation that bypass traditional security controls.
Contextual Vulnerability Testing. OWASP Top 10 scanning for applications & APIs with remediation guidance that's tailored to your designs.
Adaptive Bot Protection. Behavioral analysis distinguishes legitimate users from malicious bots with high accuracy, stopping attacks without blocking real traffic.
Restore trust in application runtime.
Users access applications in unexpected ways, and hardened systems are still prone to attack. Harness WAAP unifies application, API, and AI runtime signals so you can quickly detect and respond to threats.
Find exposures before attackers do.
Modern AI-native designs are complex. Harness WAAP gives you visibility over sensitive data flows so you can secure it all without incident.
Application runtime security for the AI era
Unified API and application security from discovery through testing and runtime protection. Harness WAAP is powered by AI and matched to your architecture.
API Discovery
Automated discovery, cataloging, and posture assessment of all APIs and data flows across your environments.
API Vulnerability Testing
Continuous scanning for OWASP Top 10 risks with contextualized guidance and code samples.
API Protection
Defense against evolving API threats and complex attack chains so incidents don't turn into breaches.
Bot & Abuse Protection
Protection against credential stuffing, scraping, and other automated abuse to safeguard your business.
Web Application Firewall
Cloud-scale, API-centric WAF for extensive protection against CVE-ID exploits, OWASP T10 risks, and more.
Threat intelligence
Application threat intelligence with business context for effective security operations & incident response.
Full-fidelity signals
Security data lake built for application-layer context and extended retention, not just metadata or traffic samples.
Flexible deployment
Multiple deployment options: agentless edge, in-line instrumentation, or out-of-band collection for any architecture.
API security for all teams
Enable your API security program.
Automatic discovery of every API endpoint in your environments, eliminating blindspots
Continuous vulnerability scanning with prioritized remediation based on risk and exploitability
API schema discovery from traffic and validation against API specifications.
Proven API security at scale
“API Discovery revealed 40+ endpoints we didn't know existed. Several were exposing customer data without authentication. Harness WAAP caught what our other tools missed.”
— Security Lead, CISO, FinTech
“Bot protection stopped a massive credential stuffing attack automatically. Zero account takeovers, zero manual intervention required. The ML detection is incredibly accurate.”
— Security Engineer, Senior Security Analyst, E-commerce
“Millions of API calls protected monthly across our customer base. The scale and accuracy of threat detection is unmatched — full fidelity visibility makes all the difference.”
— Platform Team, VP of Engineering, SaaS Provider
Works with your entire stack
Harness WAAP supports CDN & edge data collection, out-of-band collection with traffic mirroring or eBPF, and in-line instrumentation with API/AI gateways and language agents.
Common questions answered
WAAP is a platform-oriented, application runtime security approach that combines web application firewall (WAF), API discovery, API testing, API protection, and bot & abuse protection to defend web applications and APIs from modern attacks.
Traditional web application firewall (WAF) focuses primarily on web application attacks that occur through web protocols (HTTP/HTTPS), web UI interactions, and client-side JavaScript interactions with backend systems. If you expose APIs, run microservices, or see automated abuse, a WAAP platform adds API security controls and bot protection that most legacy WAF products don't cover well.
WAAP platforms extend coverage to APIs with continuous API discovery, sensitive data flow analysis, continous vulnerability checking, API threat protection, and bot & abuse mitigation within a unified platform so you can detect and protect against application as well as API attacks.
WAAP platforms help prevent SQL injection (SQLi), cross-site scripting (XSS), bruteforcing, credential stuffing, account takeover (ATO), business logic abuse, transaction fraud, bot attacks, and application-layer denial-of-service (DoS) attacks targeting web applications and APIs.
Yes, WAAP platforms typically address OWASP API Security Top 10 risks with a combination of authentication and authorization checks, sensitive data flow analysis, threat detection, rate limiting, anomaly detection, and abuse protection. Risks also extend to unsafe third-party API consumption and API inventory management, which require a WAAP platform that offers continuous API discovery and data flow analysis across environments.
Most WAAP platforms include capabilities to detect and block malicious automation, or bots, like web scraping, credential stuffing, and transaction fraud, while allowing good forms of automation such as agentic AI and robotic process automation (RPA).
WAAP platforms may deploy as cloud services (SaaS) or integration with a content delivery networks (CDN) at the edge. Stronger WAAP platforms provide multiple deployment options that support hybrid- and multi-cloud strategies, so you can protect web applications and APIs across environment types. This includes in-line deployment options like API gateway integration, sidecar containers, and instrumentation agents (e.g., eBPF) as well as other out-of-bound options like traffic mirroring.
Yes, some WAAP solutions work with Kubernetes by integrating with ingress controllers, deploying as sidecar containers in clusters, or instrumenting application workloads (e.g., eBPF) to provide additional layers of application and API protection for microservices traffic, sometimes referred to as inner-service or east/west (E/W) traffic.
WAAP platforms typically inspect HTTPS traffic via TLS termination at the edge or proxies in different points of a system architecture. TLS termination enables application and API threat detection without sacrificing secure transport. WAAP platforms may also instrument application workloads directly (e.g., eBPF) before any transport encryption is in effect.
WAAP platforms do not replace an API gateway's access control enforcement, intelligent routing, rate/use limiting, versioning, and lifecycle management commonly seen in API management platforms. However, WAAP complements API gateways and API management with dedicated API discovery, API threat protection, and bot & abuse protection.
Get started with Harness Web Application & API Protection
Get a demo of Harness WAAP to see how our API discovery, API security testing, API protection, bot & abuse protection, and WAF can help.