Chapter 11
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