Chapter 17: Protecting Against Denial of Service Attacks

Chapter 17

Protecting Against Denial of Service Attacks

Denial of service (DoS) attacks are some of the most difficult attacks to protect against. You'll need to put a lot of thought into how your application can be attacked in this manner and how you can foil these attacks. I'm going to illustrate some of the more common types of DoS attack with both code and real-world examples. People sometimes dismiss these attacks because the attacks don't directly elevate privilege, but there are cases in which an attacker might be able to impersonate the server if a server becomes unavailable. DoS attacks are becoming increasingly common, so you should definitely be prepared for them. Common DoS attacks that I will discuss in this chapter include these:

• Application crash or operating system crash, or both

• CPU starvation

• Memory starvation

• Resource starvation

• Network bandwidth attacks