How to defend against a sync flood attack?

Hi,

this is the official CERT advisory.

http://www.cert.org/advisories/CA-1996-21.html

Basically it says that ...

There is, as yet, no generally accepted solution to this problem with the current IP protocol technology. However, proper router configuration can reduce the likelihood that your site will be the source of one of these attacks.

wmp

The advisory also gives some advice for configuring routers  to reduce the effectiveness of an attack. Keep in mind that the attack relies on the use of a source address that won't complete the three-way handshake, so the use of non-routable addresses is common and easily filtered.

In addition, most firewalls or intrusion prevention systems offer some detection and connection throttling to protect downstream systems.

Do we have any tool on hosts (linux box) which can help us to prevent/defend this attack? what I should do if I notice this attack?

I am curious to know if anything I can do at hosts level.

Iptables is a powerful tool for defending against several attacks. Beyond simple rules to deny connections from non-routable addresses, it also provides features like connection throttling to limit the effectiveness of these attacks. There are several web sites with details on how to block things like Xmas attacks, etc..

Add a tool like ossec to watch the logs created by iptables to give you a heads up when something's going on.

Finally, there's no substitute for a dedicated ips/firewall to take the brunt of this and offload your apps servers and workstations. There are plenty of opensource solutions, many based on tools like snort.

Hi hfraser, When you say "Keep in mind that the attack relies on the use of a source address that won't complete the three-way handshake, so the use of non-routable addresses is common and easily filtered."

then i think you are talking about private-ip address (non-routable). But if my laptop has private IP address and it is behind a wifi router and using NAT. so does it mean iptables on web server on which I am sending the request can filter my traffic?? Thanks!

Thank you! :-)