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The Wonderful World of WAF
13 March 2026, 12:00 pm–1:00 pm
Join us for a talk on Web Application Firewall (WAF) and the underlying architecture that allows it to interpret human-readable traffic.
This event is free.
Event Information
Open to
- All
Availability
- Yes
Cost
- Free
Organiser
-
Institute of Communications and Connected Systems
Location
-
Room 421Roberts BuildingTorrington PlaceLondonWC1E 7JEUnited Kingdom
The Wonderful World of WAF
While traditional firewalls operate at the network and transport layers, the Web Application Firewall (WAF) must master the complexities of Layer 7. This primer offers a ground-up technical deconstruction of WAF technology. We move beyond the "black box" mentality to examine the underlying architecture that allows a WAF to interpret human-readable traffic as a potential vector for attack.
About the ICCS seminar series
The ICCS seminar series is designed to bring together members of our community across the world. The Seminars are being curated to provide academic exploration and inspiration, offering insights into a range of topics surrounding communications and connected systems. Topics will either explore subjects close to the work of our academics or introduce wider concepts from experts in the global academic and industrial community.
If you wish to suggest a future topic or speaker, please kindly use this link. Speakers could be from academia, industry, within ICCS/UCL or from further a field.
Format
The seminar will begin with a presentation aimed at a technical audience, but at a level that will be accessible to those from a range of engineering disciplines. Speakers have been asked to end their presentations with a technical challenge or delving deeper into the content to engage those more invested in the topic.
The seminar series is designed to offer a compact exploration of ranging topics and is therefore short in format.
About the Speaker
Dr Chris Howe
at BT
Chris Howe is an Enterprise Security Architect at BT, where he is responsible for the architecture of security infrastructure and cyber Governance Risk and Compliance (GRC) tools. He's been at BT for 19 years, having covered a variety of defensive security, offensive security, network design and architecture roles, including running a network test platform whose bandwidth was comparable to a small European country!
Prior to that Chris did a Ph. D in Experimental Physics at Loughborough University. His thesis was entitled: Medium Energy Ion Scattering Analysis of Ultra-Thin Metallic Films. It essentially involved using a particle accelerator to analyse atomically thin metallic layers upon other metallic crystals and using Monte-Carlo simulations to model and compare in order to determine the crystallographic placement of the two metals.
Chris lives in the West Midlands with his family