Researcher Bypasses Akamai WAF

Akamai’s Web application firewall (WAF) is intended to fend off potential attacks like distributed denial-of-service (DDoS), but a researcher discovered a way to bypass its protections by using complex payloads to confuse its rules.

The researcher, known as Peter H., along with Usman Mansha, said Akamai has since patched against the vulnerability, which was not assigned a CVE number. In the write-up, Peter H. explained how he used a vulnerable version of Spring Boot to bypass WAF protections.

“We ended up able to bypass Akamai WAF and achieve Remote Code Execution (P1) using Spring Expression Language injection on an application running Spring Boot,” the GitHub explanation of the Akamai WAF RCE find explained. “This was the 2nd RCE via SSTI we found on this program, after the 1st one, the program implemented a WAF which we were able to bypass in a different part of the application.”