Sessions

Speaker: Kevin Delgadillo

Modern apps require modern deployment models that simplify and accelerate repeatable rollouts while minimizing errors. Join this breakout session to learn how F5's modern declarative APIs can enable app services deployment automation while abstracting configuration complexity away.

Speaker: Ulises Alonso Camaro

The session will show different deployment options for BIG-IP in VMware NSX-T, explaining the pros and cons of each one. We’ll also describe NSX-T's inner workings which are important when choosing the best option for a given use case.

Speaker: Liam Crilly

You wait decades for a new HTTP version and then two come along at once! Following just six years after HTTP/2 was introduced, HTTP/3 is here and with it, QUIC, a brand-new transport protocol. In this session, we discuss why HTTP/2's reign was short lived and why we will be living with all three HTTP versions for the foreseeable future.

Speakers: Mariana Agache, Ian Harris, Rich Lopez

Service providers can solve key application challenges in their digital transformation by offering managed services that enable an enterprise to easily deploy and secure applications in any location (i.e., on premises, at the edge, in a private data center, or in a public cloud). In this way, you can focus on developing key apps for your business rather than worrying about how to deliver and secure those applications. In this session, we’ll show you managed app services that a service provider can offer using F5 technology, successful use cases, and the support that F5 provides service providers to ensure their success in generating revenue from these managed application services.

Speakers: Ronnie Dockery, Roman Jouhannet

Apps are how the modern enterprise materializes the consumer expectation of positive digital experiences. However, ensuring those apps can deliver on that promise by performing well, running securely, and remaining available is extremely difficult—especially with large portfolios of apps and services. Join this session to learn about the benefits of adopting a centralized, app-centric approach for managing, gaining visibility into, and automating your BIG-IP deployments.

Speakers: Nicolas Menant, Owen Garrett

It’s time to bridge the divide between your DevOps and infrastructure teams. In this breakout session, we’ll introduce a single step to deployment for a traditionally siloed, 2-step process across teams. You’ll walk away knowing how to reduce time to market, with the bonus of value-added services layered on top.

Speakers: Greg Coward, David Garrison

Join this session to learn about F5’s cloud-agnostic solution for centralized application delivery monitoring and management. This solution leverages analytics and automation tools such as Splunk, ELK, and Terraform to monitor ADC performance and autoscale infrastructure and configurations automatically.

Speakers: Marco Rodrigues, Pranav Dharwadkar

Workloads are increasingly being deployed across different clouds and providers, which can increase the complexity of the network and the sprawl of tools and services. In this session, you’ll learn how to consolidate networking services and increase agility while migrating workloads into a multi-cloud environment.

Speakers: Zach Westall, Ken Boccino

Self-service capabilities, automation, and consistency are the hallmarks of modern application development and delivery. Join this breakout session to learn how NGINX Controller can help you streamline your modern application delivery across teams.

Speakers: Geng Lin, Lori MacVittie

Ask F5 CTO, Geng Lin, your most burning tech questions in this Q&A discussion moderated by F5 Technical Evangelist, Lori Mac Vittie.

Speakers: Sumit Agarwal, Mengmeng Chen, Yuxi Yao

Every day, your B2C website receives numerous visits from returning good customers. But do you have measures in place to handle them differently than everyone else? Manual login, forgetting password, etc. are all various forms of friction that impedes customer engagements. By removing such friction intelligently, B2C commerce websites can lift 1–2% of top line revenue, allowing security teams to contribute to business outcomes.

Speakers: Jesica Church, Hugh Gilmore

The tech we use and deploy daily is riddled with terminology that is exclusionary and biased. For years, our industry has been making strides towards greater inclusivity, but it will take all of us to create broader momentum and be part of the change. Join a moderated panel to discuss the efforts and issues of driving systematic transformation in partnership with members from the Inclusive Naming Initiative, a global community of professionals from leading organizations whose mission is to help companies and projects remove harmful and unclear language and replace it with an agreed-upon set of neutral terms. 

An iRule is a powerful and flexible feature within the BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) system that you can use to manage your network traffic. The iRules feature not only allows you to select pools based on header data, but also allows you to direct traffic by searching on any type of content data that you define. In this lab, you’ll learn how to utilize HTTP iRules to direct, secure, and enhance your HTTP(s) traffic. You’ll also get some hands-on time to gain experience writing and troubleshooting iRules.

You may find it difficult at times to troubleshoot application traffic coming through BIG-IP. In this lab, you’ll learn how to utilize tcpdump and the F5 Wireshark plugin to gain perspective on how traffic is flowing through BIG-IP and seeing where a performance issue might be found.

Gain hands-on experience on how to manage BIG-IP in your ACI + BIG-IP deployment by leveraging the F5 Automation Toolchain and ACI’s programmable App Center framework.

Learn how this simple and native integration aims to solve important real world use cases:

1. Deep infrastructure visibility into the ACI and BIG-IP deployment
2. Network and application management on BIG-IP

Join this lab to find out how to leverage APIs to achieve end-to-end network automation workflows and learn how different personas within your organization can benefit from these features and functionalities.

In this hands-on lab we’ll show you how to take the complexity out of safeguarding your apps with F5 Essential App Protect Service—a feature-rich, checkbox-simple SaaS security solution. You’ll learn how to spin up protection against common web exploits, malicious IPs, and coordinated attacks within minutes, all without requiring extensive security expertise. You’ll experience how developers can protect their apps or tune WAF configuration features through the rich declarative API or an intuitive user interface.  

We’ll cover how to:

• Set up a trial F5 Cloud Services account
• Configure Essential App Protect Service for a fictitious app
• Test the configuration by sending scripted and targeted attacks through Postman and a browser
• Get hands-on experience with several key use cases that can be easily applied to your app ecosystem

In this self-guided lab, you’ll work in a dedicated AWS environment to build an HA pair of F5 Advanced WAFs from an AWS CloudFormation template. Learn how to quickly create virtual servers with a single RESTful API call via the declarative F5 Application Services 3 iControl LX extension.

F5 and Microsoft Azure Government: Meeting SCCA Requirements. In this lab, we’ll discuss the challenges of the Department of Defense’s (DoD) cloud adoption and examine exciting solutions to meeting complex requirements of a secure cloud architecture. 

During this hands-on lab, we’ll cover:

• CAP/SCCA/VDSS requirements
• The status of Azure Government and the programs in place to use it
• How F5’s Virtual Data Security Stack helps you meet the SCCA mandates
• Live lab deploying a VDSS into Azure Government Cloud
• In-depth overview of a POC for a shared VDSS model for cybersecurity service provider organizations
• Solutions for a virtual, scalable way to meet O365 CAP/VDSS demands using Azure and F5

In this lab, you’ll deploy a 3-NIC Google API-based failover-based template and then building upon that with an overview of the F5 failover extension.

Learn about the new F5 SaaS-based DNS offerings including DNS secondary configuration and DNS load balancing utilizing F5 Cloud Services.

Speaker: Anish Johnson, Saurabh Bajaj

With the proliferation of apps that have adopted anti-bot technologies such as Shape Enterprise Defense, attackers are finding it difficult to identify soft targets. Instead of expending resources in an attempt to circumvent anti-automation technologies, fraudsters are pivoting and attacking unprotected email servers that become the steppingstone to the ultimate goal: your customer accounts. This, in turn, has resulted in a change in the credential marketplace landscape. Shape Security has been protecting our customers from automated attacks for years and has observed that fraudsters are left with no option but to revert to manual (i.e., human-driven) fraud methods. For this reason, we’ve developed machine learning models that specifically protect banks, credit unions, and other financial institutions.

Speakers: Manish Desai, Anitha Mareedu, Jay Kelley

Most organizations are moving toward a Zero Trust security architecture to protect their applications wherever they reside. In order to even begin thinking about deploying a Zero Trust environment, you’ll need to bridge the chasm between modern and classic identity management and authentication. F5 and Microsoft have accomplished that, through the integration of BIG-IP APM and Azure Active Directory. In this session, we’ll dive deeper into how Zero Trust by enabling trusted identity, app access security, and risk management to be applied to every access request on a continuous basis. We’re taking the Zero Trust axiom of “Never trust, always verify” to a new level, adding “Continuously monitor” to the mix.

Speaker: Wesley Hales

Device and user identifiers are the common thread that span the entire technology stack. Organizations use them to drive fraud prevention and critical business analytics. Device ID+ is a real-time, high-precision device identifier that utilizes advanced signal collection and machine learning algorithms to assign a unique identifier to each device visiting your site. In this session, we’ll give you a rundown on how Device ID+ works, why it’s important, and how to use it within your application.

Speaker: Lori Mac Vittie

Technologies that deliver and secure applications are the status quo. Without them, applications don't scale, don't perform, and ultimately impact the customer experience. As businesses become digital, the technologies that enable experiences must evolve to deliver the data and actionable insights necessary to optimize and secure applications. This session will explore the current state of application delivery and security technologies and how data unlocks future business and digital capabilities.

Speaker: Saurabh Bajaj, Dan Woods, Brian Uffelman

Bots and unwanted automation drive billions of dollars in fraud losses for organizations around the globe every year. In this session, you’ll learn how F5 and Shape protect against the evolving threats from bots and cybercriminals that drive application fraud and abuse. Shape’s antibot platform uniquely defends against bots and unwanted automation for your customers. Learn how to find and qualify antibot opportunities and protect your customer’s applications from attack.

Speakers: Sumit Agarwal, Corey Marshall, Smriti Jaggi

Join this breakout to learn more about Device ID+, a real-time, high-precision device identifier that utilizes advanced signal collection and proven machine learning algorithms to assign a unique identifier to each device visiting your site.

Speaker: Pranav Dharwadkar, Jakub Pavlik

Containerization and serverless computing have had a significant impact on how apps are architected, networked, and secured. In this session, we’ll provide real world examples of app and API security attacks. We’ll also cover the four key security tenets—discover, analyze, secure, and anywhere—that users should look for in an app or API focused security solution.

Speaker: John Cianfarani

The term "dark web" is used so frequently but what is it and what does it really mean? This session aims to help you understand what you can find on the dark web, interesting stats and trends, how to safely access it, and how to protect your web and mobile applications.

Speakers: Ray Pompon, Sander Vinberg

Join this session to hear the latest insights from the F5 Labs Application Protection Research Series. We'll share insights from the past four years of data analysis on breach data, global honeypot nets, vulnerability analysis, and customer incident reports, including details on how the pandemic changed cybersecurity and what new threats emerged.

Speaker: Saurabh Bajaj

Over the course of the last decade, the nature of cybersecurity has changed, evolving past the idea of cybersecurity being a system of logical controls to prevent attackers from infiltrating systems, to becoming a data analytics problem based on behavioral analysis of attack patterns to detect them when they do. As such, fraud and abuse have become the primary focus areas for organizations’ defensive efforts, and the use of artificial intelligence—particularly machine learning—has become one of the principal tools. This talk will review how cybersecurity challenges have changed, examine the emergence of credential stuffing as the #1 cybersecurity problem in the world—with real data from major corporations—and demonstrate next generation uses of machine learning in defending organizations and millions of users around the world.

Speakers: Jay Kelley, Manish Desai, Don Laursen

According to the 2020 Phishing & Fraud Report from F5 Labs, the majority of phishing links—over 71%—use valid HTTPS certificates to appear credible so that they can fool you into clicking on a malicious link. Join this session to learn how F5 SSL Orchestrator can stop the bait used in encrypted phishing and spear phishing campaigns and how it can also secure non-standard ports from being a source of data loss.

Speakers: Jay Kelley, Manish Desai, Don Laursen

Today, bad actors are using the same security tools you use against you. They’re able to do this through product specific gaps in modern cipher support, performance limitations, and crypto complexity, bypassing the security you’ve deployed. In this session, you’ll learn how to simplify the traffic decryption challenge and secure against data exfiltration and C2 communications with effective decryption of outbound network traffic. See how your organization can support both legacy and modern ciphers while protecting against cipher mismatches and unintentional bypass, plus enable intelligent decryption bypass for privacy regulation adherence. And finally, we’ll help you understand how to encrypt the entire “hello” process and import visibility solutions.

Speakers: Frank Strobel, Matt Westover – Stellar Cyber

With F5 and Stellar Cyber, enterprises gain 360-degree visibility across their IT operations and can more easily remediate any security vulnerabilities that do arise. Stellar Cyber provides a leading open security operations platform providing high-speed, high-fidelity threat detection across the entire attack surface, and F5 is the industry leader in protecting apps. By consolidating visibility and analytics across F5’s WAF products through Stellar Cyber, this joint solution delivers best-of-breed protection, 360-degree visibility, high-fidelity detection, and fast remediation—all easily accessed through a single, intuitive user interface.

Speakers: Jay Kelley, Manish Desai

As many employees and other personnel continue to work remotely, organizations­—including government agencies and ministries—have begun to evolve their thinking on Zero Trust security architectures. Organizations are becoming more comfortable with the idea of working remotely and are seeking to lay the foundation for securing this new working style. Most U.S. and foreign government agencies,—and even highly regulated private sector industries such as financial services and healthcar­­e—are viewing the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) Special Publication 800-207 Zero Trust Architecture as a guide on how to deploy a Zero Trust model. In this session, you’ll learn how F5’s security portfolio maps to the NIST 800-207 guidelines to assist not just U.S. federal agencies, but also foreign governments and private sector organizations, in rapidly adopting a Zero Trust architecture to augment their existing security investments, and to help develop new, safer workflows and operations.

Speaker: Pranav Dharwadkar

In this session, we’ll explore how best to address the challenges of securing modern microservices apps at the API level by leveraging machine learning and API auto-discovery and control.

Speakers: Eric Ji, Matt Quill, James Lee

In modern application architectures, security concerns are more complex than ever. In this session, we’ll explore how you can implement a layered security policy for your modern app environment through a combination of F5 Advanced WAF and NGINX App Protect, tailored to the needs of different cybersecurity teams of NetSecOps and DevSecOps. We will also show how NGINX+, Elastic, Red Hat Ansible, and Red Hat OpenShift work together to automate remediation tasks in your IT environment.

Speakers: John Cianfarani, Anish Johnson, Payal Shah

Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, many of F5’s customers have seen a noticeable uptick in new account applications coming in and have had to adjust operations as their current customers adjust their usage patterns. If you’re seeing similar trends and are concerned about how to ensure a smooth experience for users while keeping malicious actors out, join this session and see how F5 SAFE can help. As users visit and interact with your site or application, SAFE inconspicuously collects several hundred signals across user journey, behavior, and environment, and evaluates the risk of account opening or account takeover fraud using a customized machine learning model tuned for your enterprise.

Speaker: Jay Kelley

A cultural shift is underway in how organizations look at security. Organizations with a traditional “security as the gatekeeper” mindset cannot scale and be effective in an environment where change is rapid and continuous. An important component of this cultural shift is the need to quickly abandon the concept of security as the gatekeeper and then embrace security as a shared responsibility across disciplines and teams. Join this session to find out how security controls can shift further left in the CI/CD pipeline and how the responsibility for security can be shared throughout the development process.

Speakers: Payal Shah, Josh Goldfarb

The COVID-19 pandemic has affected billions of people around the world. Aside from the virus’ health ramifications, the corresponding lockdowns, travel restrictions, and closures have brought with them a tremendous economic impact. The unfortunate result is that many are hurting financially, having lost their jobs or otherwise suffered a drastic reduction in income. By implementing controls to prevent and monitor fraud, state agencies can greatly reduce the amount of unemployment fraud. Join this session to learn how Shape has been able to facilitate millions of dollars in fraud savings for organizations during the pandemic.

Speaker to be announced

The COVID-19 pandemic has introduced complexity and chaos into nearly every aspect of our lives. The associated surge in unemployment fraud merely adds to that chaos. Rather than giving up and opting to live with billions of dollars in fraud losses each year, the time has come to take action. Join this discussion to find out how fraud detection and prevention platforms such as the Shape AI Fraud Engine (SAFE) can empower us to identify and stop different types of fraud, including unemployment fraud.

Speakers: James Lee, Matt Quill

This discussion will explore how NGINX App Protect, in combination with Ansible automation, can respond in real time to application threats. We’ll whiteboard out the process by which a threat is detected and a WAF policy is enforced automatically.

Speakers: Nic Garmendia, Edgar Ojeda, Lori Seabright

F5’s Security Operations Center (SOC) analysts are on the front lines, working 24x7 with customers to thwart attacks and add protections to keep their businesses up and running. In this session, our DDoS and WAF analysts will walk thru real attack scenarios and share best practices on how you can remain vigilant against persistent attackers. Cyberattacks are not going away so learn from the experts who have visibility into the attacks impacting businesses like yours.

Speaker to be announced

Join us for an interactive conversation about how Shape Security's real-time, high-precision device identifier can protect your users, applications, and data by utilizing advanced signal collection and proven machine learning algorithms to assign a unique identifier to each device visiting your site.

This is an introductory lab focused on F5 Access Policy Manager (APM). In this lab, you’ll learn the fundamental concepts of BIG-IP APM and learn about the components within the module.

During this lab you’ll cover:

• Provisioning and main menu navigation
• Access guided config concepts
• Authentication types and frameworks
• Visual Policy Editor concepts
• Access log overview
• Access policy frameworks
• Webtop concepts

In this BIG-IP Access Policy Manager (APM) Lab, you’ll work through the fundamental building blocks and intermediate concepts leveraged in Access. You will build on the fundamental concepts from the 101 class and delve into more complex authentication with per session and per request policies.

During this lab you’ll learn:

• Access policy frameworks
• Client-side authentication
• Server-side authentication

Security is becoming more challenging as organizations shift to a remote workforce and applications reside in multiple locations beyond the enterprise data center. This has caused organizations to look for new and innovative ways to solve the complex problem for real-time authentication and authorization controls.

F5’s Zero Trust Architecture uses the Identity Aware Proxy (IAP) to create real-time contextual access decisions regardless of endpoint location. Contextual access can come from a multitude of sources including Identity providers, client posture, resource posture, or integration third party tools.  

During this hands-on lab you will learn how to configure the following:

• Configure IAP using guided configuration
• Conduct Client posture assessments using F5 Access Guard
• Collect resource and third-party data via HTTP connector

Request-by-request security is a foundational element when considering modern application delivery and security. Beyond single session authentication security, the need and ability to control access based on dynamic changes to the user, client, resource posture or external telemetry is critical and factors into Zero Trust architectures. In this lab, you’ll explore F5's per-request policies and apply their functionality to control secure access to applications.

During this hands-on lab you will learn how to:

• Configure per-request policies using guided configuration
• Create dynamic per-request policies to control access and security
• Use OAuth in conjunction with per-request policies to control application access

Did you know you can implement BIG-IP Access Policy Manager (APM) solutions through automation? Learn how to navigate the APM REST API, attach policy with AS3, and build BIG-IP APM objects and policies through imperative calls.  

During this lab, you will learn how to:

• Configure iControl REST navigation and AS3 declarations
• Build APM objects
• Create per-session policies
• Create per-request policies
• Deploy solutions through automation

BIG-IP Advanced Firewall Manager (AFM)’s unique application-centric design enables greater effectiveness in guarding against targeted network-level attacks. It tracks the state of network sessions, maintains deep application awareness, and uniquely mitigates attacks based on more granular details than traditional firewalls. The purpose of this lab is to walk you through the setup of BIG-IP AFM to protect applications at multiple layers of the OSI stack, thereby providing advanced application security control. This, in effect, allows BIG-IP AFM to be multiple firewalls within a single platform.

Description coming soon

Investigate and explore the movement to DNS over HTTPS and TLS and create a DNS server that will respond to DOH and DOT with F5.

F5 iRules can be used to fix things that are missing or hard to solve for in the existing application stack. F5 iRules give you the power and flexibility to fill security gaps. This self-guided lab will show you a handful of ways to use iRules to defend and protect against malicious activity in your enterprise.

As the volume of data continues to grow at a rapid pace, more companies are deploying Secure Socket Layer (SSL) and Transport Layer Security (TLS) solutions to encrypt data in transit.

In this “follow me”-style lab, you’ll learn how F5 SSL Orchestrator maximizes visibility across your network, increases infrastructure efficiencies, and heightens security by:

• Effectively inspecting encrypted traffic
• Supporting multiple deployment modes
• Easily integrating with complex architectures for optimal flexibility.

As organizational requirements change, so does the need to update security polices and add additional features to existing SSL Orchestrator deployments. This lab will demonstrate how easy maintenance can be within the SSL Orchestrator dashboard.

You’ll learn to understand the SSL Orchestrator dashboard, tune security polices, and add authentication to allow access to an outbound SSL Orchestrator topology by: 

• Establishing baselines to accurately determine anomalies or security events
• Modifying existing SSL Orchestrator configurations to keep up with business and security demands
• Integrating authentication and membership checks to customize user experiences

The OWASP Top 10 is the de facto list of the top 10 most prevalent web application attacks. A challenge for many security practitioners is taking this list of high-level attacks and turning them into real, actionable protection of their applications. In this lab, we’ll demonstrate how to quickly protect against the OWASP Top 10 by leveraging solutions across the F5 technology portfolio, primarily, BIG-IP Advanced WAF in addition to NGINX WAF and F5 iRules for AWS WAF.

In this lab, you’ll learn how to approach a WAF deployment and add security in layers to protect the application from known attacks—the negative security model.

Topics covered:

• IP Intelligence
• Geolocation
• Bot defense
• Threat campaigns
• Transparent mode policy
• Server technologies
• Evasion techniques protection
• Attack signatures and more

Prerequisites:
Interest in WAF, no working knowledge of F5 Advanced WAF needed, although helpful

Take your security policy to the next level. Use traffic learning to phase in a more restrictive positive security posture. We’ll cover elevated bot protection, learning and positive security, L7 DoS protection, and login page protection. 

Topics covered:

• Bot defense – blocking mode
• Cookie tampering protection
• HTTP redirection protection
• Learning – file types
• Learning – headers
• Login pages
• DoS and behavioral DoS 

Prerequisites:
Soft requirement of the WAF 141 lab

Learn how to layer on additional security features and further enhance WAF policy using learning of parameters and URLs.

Topics covered:

• Anti-bot mobile SDK
• Brute force protection
• Credential stuffing protection
• Data guard
• Data safe
• HTTP methods control
• Meta character enforcement
• Learning – parameters
• Learning – URLs
• Sensitive data – masking in logs
• Session hijacking protection
• User session tracking

Prerequisites:
Soft requirement of WAF 241 or working knowledge of WAF policy and learning

Join this lab to learn how to integrate your Advanced WAF into your CI/CD pipeline.

Topics covered:

• Best practice policy recommendations for this scenario
• Declarative WAF API (new feature introduced in 15.1)
• WAF policy templating 
• Integrating your WAF as part of your AS3 declaration 
• Testing the effectiveness of your WAF 

Prerequisites:
Familiarity with CI/CD and ASM, some experience with AS3 and ASM is recommended, but not required

As the dependency of API usage increases across organizations, so do the tools used to protect them. APIs were historically protected through dedicated API gateways performing complex tasks. The complex requirements for API gateways have decreased as the adoption of REST has increased in organizations. API gateways have been narrowed to three specific requirements: authentication, authorization, and content validation.

Using F5 Advanced WAF in conjunction with BIG-IP Access Policy Manager (APM), an organization can not only achieve the requirements needed for a traditional API gateway but increased security and authorization controls.

During this hands-on lab, you’ll learn how to:

• Build an API protection profile using OpenAPI spec files 
• Configure BIG-IP as a resource server for OAuth and OIDC for course-grain access control
• Configure BIG-IP APM’s per-request policy engineer to provide fine-grain access control 
• Configure Advanced WAF to protect against common API attacks