Successful syn flooding DoS
- Reply: Michael Tuexen : "Re: Successful syn flooding DoS"
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Date: Thu, 04 Sep 2025 22:26:08 UTC
Folks, today I fell victim to a syn flooding party; one of my machines went offline and needed a full reset to recover. Why: If somebody sends me a SYN (might be spoofed), I reply with SYN-ACK. If there is a portforwarder in the path, then libalias will consider this state of affairs a fully established connection, and preserve the record, for... a day. If somebody send me 100 SYN packets per second, then after a few hour the libalias will have accumulated millions of these records. They go into a tailq. And at that size, the network receiving thread searching through that will run at 100% CPU. That receiving thread is a network interrupt, prio 8, so if the machine is a single vcore KVM, it won't do much else anymore. As a quick measure I have now tried to change libalias to require a bit more data before making the timeout that long. But in the meantime the idiots have stopped their nonsense, so there is no test. Comments, anybody? cheerio, PMc