Joe Shaw writes:
Don't most SYN flood programs just send a constant stream of SYNs to the
specified machine/port? The one I have for testing does that. So,
sequential requests would get around this, no matter how many SYNs you
were looking for. I think the best protection against SYN flooding is in
the Kernel level of the OS. If you see a massive amount of SYN request
coming in on one port from one machine or many, then you start applying
cookies for those connections and decrease the hold time before you start
dropping the connections due to un-answered SYN-ACKs. Don't most
operating systems now support this feature (Win95 excluded)?
The whole "cookie" idea pretty much sucks, IMHO. It doesn't work
particularly well.
On the other hand, compressing your TCP state for half open
connections is pretty cheap, and has the nice side effect of making
your machine a much more efficient high volume server.
Perry