Service exhaustion floods — HTTP/HTTPS flood, HTTP pipelining, and SSL renegotiation DDoS attack

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On 1 June 2022, a Google Cloud Armor customer was hit with a Distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack over the Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure (HTTPS) protocol that reached 46 million requests per second (RPS), making it one of the largest ever recorded Layer 7 DDoS attacks reported this year. By Debashis Pal.

In Wireshark, tls.handshake.type == 1 will show all instances of Client Hello. If there are too many of these packets coming from the same source IPs, this could be an attack …

This article is good analysis of Layer 7 attacks:

  • HTTP flood DDoS attack
  • How to analyse for HTTP flood attacks
  • HTTP pipelining attack
  • How to analyse HTTP pipelining
  • SSL renegotiation and HTTPS flood DDoS attack
  • How HTTPS works
  • SSL/TLS renegotiation
  • How to analyse for thc-ssl-flood attacks
  • HTTPS flood DDoS attack
  • How to analyse for HTTPS flooding

HTTP floods consist of a continuous legitimate session of HTTP GET or HTTP POST that GET and POST requests to a targeted web server. These requests are specifically designed to consume a significant amount of the servers resources. To achieve maximum impact, malicious actors usually employ botnets — many devices infected with malware. Malicious actors may also use other HTTP methods such as PUT and DELETE to make the attack more complex. Very informative!

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