Skip site navigation (1)Skip section navigation (2)
Date:      Wed, 9 Feb 2000 21:25:45 -0600
From:      Dan Nelson <dnelson@emsphone.com>
To:        Ed Gold <edgold@mindspring.com>
Cc:        "hackers@FreeBSD.ORG" <hackers@FreeBSD.ORG>
Subject:   Re: Regarding DOS violations
Message-ID:  <20000209212545.B69166@dan.emsphone.com>
In-Reply-To: <38A209BE.738ED208@mindspring.com>; from "Ed Gold" on Wed Feb  9 19:43:42 GMT 2000
References:  <38A209BE.738ED208@mindspring.com>

next in thread | previous in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
In the last episode (Feb 09), Ed Gold said:
> After reading the article,
> http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2000/02/09/MN23532.DTL
> 
> I am wondering if FreeBSD should take any action to protect our
> users. I think it would speak incredibly highly of FreeBSD if Yahoo
> and other "customers" were to have some kind of protection from such
> an attack. My initial thoughts are:
> 
> A web server should know its limitations and not attempt to handle
> more requests than it can manage.  It should invoke a service cutoff

The problem is that for most flood-type DoS attacks, the target machine
doesn't see most of the traffic.  The idea is to flood the
T1/T3/whatever lines, or send enough small packets that the routers are
overwhelmed.  The smart limiting you describe is good for servers that
have relatively few connections that take a lot of CPU each.  I'd say
that most database-backended servers have a similar problem, and do
have per-IP query limits or some other form of restrictions.  The best
(worst?) example of this I can think of is the all-too-common IIS
"HTTP/1.0 Server Too Busy" message.

-- 
	Dan Nelson
	dnelson@emsphone.com


To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org
with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message




Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?20000209212545.B69166>