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MEDIUMCross-serviceSecurity

Public-Facing Resources Without WAF

stack-public-resources-waf-missing

What this rule checks

Detects internet-facing entry points (public API Gateway, public ALB, CloudFront) in stacks with no AWS WAF WebACL.

How to fix it

  1. 1Associate AWS WAF with public-facing API Gateway, ALB, or CloudFront distributions

CDK Insights pinpoints the exact file and line in your CDK source for every finding, so you can jump straight to the fix.

Affected resource types

AWS::ApiGateway::RestApiAWS::ApiGatewayV2::ApiAWS::ElasticLoadBalancingV2::LoadBalancerAWS::CloudFront::DistributionAWS::WAFv2::WebACL

Compliance frameworks

SOC2PCI-DSSNIST

AWS documentation

Read the AWS guidance

Intentional? Suppress this finding

Sometimes a flag is deliberate — a genuinely public endpoint, say. You can dismiss stack-public-resources-waf-missing and the reason is kept in the report, not silently hidden.

In .cdk-insights.json:

{
  "ignoreRules": [
    { "id": "stack-public-resources-waf-missing", "reason": "Why this is intentional" }
  ]
}

Or inline in your CDK code:

Validations.of(scope).acknowledge({
  id: 'cdk-insights::stack-public-resources-waf-missing',
  reason: 'Why this is intentional',
});

Use the rule ID stack-public-resources-waf-missing shown above — not the CDK-* ID from SARIF / GitHub code scanning. To dismiss every finding on one construct instead, use ignorePaths. Suppression docs →

Catch this in your stack

$ npx cdk-insights scan

CDK Insights runs this and 144+ other rules locally against your synthesised CDK app — free, no account, your code never leaves your machine.

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