Summary

Summary

Protecting against denial of service attacks is very difficult, and sometimes there's no good answer to the overall problem. However, protecting against denial of service must be part of your overall security design. Protecting against some types of attacks, especially resource starvation attacks, can cause substantial design changes, so putting off DoS attacks until last could cause serious schedule risk.

Application failure is almost always a code quality issue. Protect against this with code reviews and fuzz testing. CPU starvation attacks are a performance issue and can be detected by profiling the code while subjecting it to abusive inputs. Memory starvation and resource starvation are both design issues and often require protective mechanisms to detect attack conditions and change behavior. Protect against network bandwidth attacks by considering how your application reacts to improper network requests.