XML firewall

In 9.0, the Application Firewall can be used to protect applications that use XML payloads. These applications include SOAP-based Web services, AJAX applications and REST-based applications that use XML. XML specific security features include

•     XML Denial of Service protection,
•     XML Well-formedness check,
•     XML attachment detection,
•     Message validation (Schema)
•     Cross Site scripting and SQL Injection protection
•     Web services Interoperability (WSI) check

 XML protection is integrated into the Application Firewall. So all applicable firewall features including Start and Deny URLs, Buffer overflow, Cookie protection and Safe Object checks are available. More details on the XML firewall functionality can be found at XML Security Features in Netscaler 9.0

Application Firewall - Integrated Caching interoperability

The 9.0 release has full interoperability between the Application firewall and the Integrated Caching (IC) module on the Netscaler. In the 8.1 release, the Application firewall supports IC for features that do not require parsing the response body.  In 9.0, this restriction is removed. This results in better performance if the application html pages are cacheable. Features like Form field consistency and URL closure benefit from this new functionality.

URL Transform module

URL transform module provides an easy regular expression based approach to rewrite requests and response URLs. This feature is available separate from the application firewall license. It builds on the application firewall parsing technology to rewrite only valid html links.

Custom error pages

When the Application Firewall detects and blocks an invalid request, it can serve out a custom HTML response that has been uploaded or do a 302 redirect to a configured URL. Previous releases could only do the 302 redirect.