Defending against DoS attacks

Defending against DoS attacks

A denial of service is the result of an attacker sending an abnormally large amount of network traffic to a target system. Having to deal with the traffic flood slows down or disables the target system so that legitimate users can not use it for the duration of the attack.

Any network traffic the target system receives has to be examined, and then accepted or rejected. TCP, UDP, and ICMP traffic is most commonly used, but a particular type of TCP traffic is the most effective. TCP packets with the SYN flag are the most efficient DoS attack tool because of how communication sessions are started between systems.

The “three-way handshake”

Communication sessions between systems start with establishing a TCP/IP connection. This is a simple three step process, sometimes called a “three-way handshake,” initiated by the client attempting to open the connection.

  1. The client sends a TCP packet with the SYN flag set. With the SYN packet, the client informs the server of its intention to establish a connection.
  2. If the server is able to accept the connection to the client, it sends a packet with the SYN and the ACK flags set. This simultaneously acknowledges the SYN packet the server has received, and informs the client that the server intends to establish a connection.
  3. To acknowledge receipt of the packet and establish the connection, the client sends an ACK packet.

Establishing a TCP/IP connection

The three-way handshake is a simple way for the server and client to each agree to establish a connection and acknowledge the other party expressing its intent. Unfortunately, the three-way handshake can be used to interfere with communication rather than facilitate it.

Defending against DoS

SYN flood

When a client sends a SYN packet to a server, the server creates an entry in its session table to keep track of the connection. The server then sends a SYN+ACK packet expecting an ACK reply and the establishment of a connection.

An attacker intending to disrupt a server with a denial of service (DoS) attack can send a flood of SYN packets and not respond to the SYN+ACK packets the server sends in response. Networks can be slow and packets can get lost so the server will continue to send SYN+ACK packets until it gives up, and removes the failed session from the session table. If an attacker sends enough SYN packets to the server, the session table will fill completely, and further connection attempts will be denied until the incomplete sessions time out. Until this happens, the server is unavailable to service legitimate connection requests.

A single client launches a SYN flood attack

SYN floods are seldom launched from a single address so limiting the number of connection attempts from a single IP address is not usually effective.

SYN spoofing

With a flood of SYN packets coming from a single attacker, you can limit the number of connection attempts from the source IP address or block the attacker entirely. To prevent this simple defense from working, or to disguise the source of the attack, the attacker may spoof the source address and use a number of IP addresses to give the appearance of a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack. When the server receives the spoofed SYN packets, the SYN+ACK replies will go to the spoofed source IP addresses which will either be invalid, or the system receiving the reply will not know what to do with it.

A client launches a SYN spoof attack

DDoS SYN flood

The most severe form of SYN attack is the distributed SYN flood, one variety of distributed denial of service attack (DDoS). Like the SYN flood, the target receives a flood of SYN packets and the ACK+SYN replies are never answered. The attack is distributed across multiple sources sending SYN packets in a coordinated attack.

Multiple attackers launch a distributed SYN flood

The distributed SYN flood is more difficult to defend against because multiple clients are capable of creating a larger volume of SYN packets than a single client. Even if the server can cope, the volume of traffic may Defending against DoS

overwhelm a point in the network upstream of the targeted server. The only defense against this is more bandwidth to prevent any choke-points.


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This entry was posted in Administration Guides, FortiOS 5.6 on by .

About Mike

Michael Pruett, CISSP has a wide range of cyber-security and network engineering expertise. The plethora of vendors that resell hardware but have zero engineering knowledge resulting in the wrong hardware or configuration being deployed is a major pet peeve of Michael's. This site was started in an effort to spread information while providing the option of quality consulting services at a much lower price than Fortinet Professional Services. Owns PacketLlama.Com (Fortinet Hardware Sales) and Office Of The CISO, LLC (Cybersecurity consulting firm).

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