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Need Help to Prevent DDOS at application layer to protect Web server ?

haseenusman
Level 1
Level 1

Please guide the solutions for DDOS attack. I am facing this attack and after some investigation I  found some details what is up against me

Here are some details of the attack which is most similar in my situation.

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In considering the ramifications of a slow denial of service attack  against particular services, rather than flooding networks, a concept  emerged that would allow a single machine to take down another machine's  web server with minimal bandwidth and side effects on unrelated  services and ports.  The ideal situation for many denial of service  attacks is where all other services remain intact but the webserver  itself is completely inaccessible.  Slowloris was born from this  concept, and is therefore relatively very stealthy compared to most  flooding tools.

Slowloris holds connections open by sending partial HTTP requests.   It continues to send subsequent headers at regular intervals to keep the  sockets from closing.  In this way webservers can be quickly tied up.   In particular, servers that have threading will tend to be vulnerable,  by virtue of the fact that they attempt to limit the amount of threading  they'll allow.  Slowloris must wait for all the sockets to become  available before it's successful at consuming them, so if it's a high  traffic website, it may take a while for the site to free up it's  sockets.  So while you may be unable to see the website from your  vantage point, others may still be able to see it until all sockets are  freed by them and consumed by Slowloris.  This is because other users of  the system must finish their requests before the sockets become  available for Slowloris to consume.  If others re-initiate their  connections in that brief time-period they'll still be able to see the  site.  So it's a bit of a race condition, but one that Slowloris will  eventually always win - and sooner than later.

Slowloris also has a few stealth features built into it.  Firstly, it  can be changed to send different host headers, if your target is a  virtual host and logs are stored seperately per virtual host.  But most  importantly, while the attack is underway, the log file won't be written  until the request is completed.  So you can keep a server down for  minutes at a time without a single log file entry showing up to warn  someone who might watching in that instant.  Of course once your attack  stops or once the session gets shut down there will be several hundred  400 errors in the web server logs.  That's unavoidable as Slowloris sits  today, although it may be possible to turn them into 200 OK messages  instead by completing a valid request, but Slowloris doesn't yet do  that.

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Please suggest any solutions with product that can help to prevent this problem with some guidance of the feature of that product to specifically prevent this type of attack. I already a many cisco devices like ASA, IPS, Cisco guard etc. just need some guidance

An early response requested and it will be highly appreciated.



1 Reply 1

Farrukh Haroon
VIP Alumni
VIP Alumni

Hello Haseen

Any tool will have some sort of trend/chracterstic that can be used to filter or throttle it out. Take skype for an example; even with all its complexity vendors managed to find days to detect it on the network and take corrective actions. However its always a catch-up game, developers continually work to make their applications or protocols more stealthy and the vendors have to keep up with this challenge.

So you would need to understand this trend/chracterstic of the attack, and then filter out using an access control mechanism, IMHO the most appropriate would be a web application firewall (WAF), Cisco used to have one but I think it is EOS soon:

http://www.cisco.com/en/US/products/ps9586/index.html

F5 Networks have their ASM module:

http://www.f5.com/products/big-ip/application-security-manager.html

Other vendors also have some good tools.

Please rate if you find the applications helpful.

Regards

Farrukh

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