Authenticate legitimate AI agent traffic with AWS WAF Bot Control

This article explains how Web Bot Authentication (WBA) in AWS WAF Bot Control uses cryptographic signatures to verify legitimate AI agent traffic and prevent spoofing attacks.

• WBA uses asymmetric cryptography and IETF standards to verify bot identities through HTTP message signatures
• AWS WAF automatically allows verified AI agent traffic and applies labels for granular control (verified, invalid, expired, unknown_bot)
• Solves multi-tenant IP-sharing challenges where traditional IP filtering and allowlists fail
• Bot Control rule group Version 4.0+ supports WBA for CloudFront; Version 6.0 extends to all AWS WAF resource types
• Enables use cases: verified customer support agents, search engine crawlers, partner integrations, and enterprise automation tools
• Agents on Amazon Bedrock AgentCore Browser get automatic request signing; others can implement signing via ed25519 key pairs

WBA provides cryptographically secure, standards-based bot authentication that reduces false positives and improves visibility into automated traffic across shared infrastructure.