Mitigating application layer (HTTP(S)) DDOS attacks

April 23, 2017

DDOS attacks seem to be new norm on the Internet. Years before only big websites and web applications got attacked but nowadays also rather small and medium companies or institutions get attacked. This makes it necessary for administrators of smaller sites to plan for the time they get attacked. This blog post shows you what you can do yourself and for what stuff you need external help. As you’ll see later you most likely can only mitigate DDOS attacks against the application layer by yourself and need help for all other attacks. One important part of a successful defense against a DDOS attack, which I won’t explain here in detail, is a good media strategy. e.g. If you can convince the media that the attack is no big deal, they may not report sensational about it and make the attack appear bigger and more problematic than it was. A classic example is a DDOS against a website that shows only information and has no impact on the day to day operation. But there are better blogs for this non technical topic, so lets get into the technical part.

different DDOS attacks

From the point of an administrator of a small website or web application there are basically 3 types of attacks:

An Attack that saturates your Internet or your providers Internet connection. (bandwidth and traffic attack)
Attacks against your website or web application itself. (application attack)

saturation attacks

Lets take a closer look at the first type of attack. There are many different variations of this connection saturation attacks and it does not matter for the SME administrator. You can’t do anything against it by yourself. Why? You can’t do anything on your server as the good traffic can’t reach your server as your Internet connection or a connection/router of your Internet Service Provider (ISP) is already saturated with attack traffic. The mitigation needs to take place on a system which is before the part that is saturated. There are different methods to mitigate such attacks.

Depending on the type of website it is possible to use a Content Delivery Networks (CDN). A CDN basically caches the data of your website in multiple geographical distributed locations. This way each location gets only attacked by a part of the attacking systems. This is a nice way to also guard against many application layer attacks but does not work (or not easily) if the content of your site is not the same for every client / user. e.g. an information website with some downloads and videos is easily changed to use a CDN but a application like a Webmail system or an accounting system will be hard to adapt and will not gain 100% protection even than. An other problem with CDNs is that you must protect each website separately, thats ok if you’ve only one big website that is the core of your business, but will be a problem if attacker can choose from multiple sites/applications. An classic example is that a company does protect its homepage with an CDN but the attacker finds via Google the Webmail of the companies Exchange Server. Instead of attacking the CDN, he attacks the Internet connection in front of the Qebmail. The problem will now most likely be that the VPN site-2-site connections to the remote offices of the company are down and working with the central systems is not possible anymore for the employees in the remote locations.

So let assume for the rest of the document that using a CDN is not possible or not feasible. In that case you need to talk to your ISPs. Following are possible mitigations a provider can deploy for you:

Using a dedicated DDOS mitigation tool. These tools take all traffic and will filter most of the bad traffic out. For this to work the mitigation tool needs to know your normal traffic patterns and the DDOS needs to be small enough that the Internet connections of the provider are able to handle it. Some companies sell on on-premise mitigation tools, don’t buy it, its wasting money.
If the DDOS attack is against an IP address, which is not mission critical (e.g. attack is against the website, but the web application is the critical system) let the provider block all traffic to that IP address. If the provider as an agreement with its upstream provider it is even possible to filter that traffic before it reaches the provider and so this works also if the ISPs Internet connection can not handle the attack.
If you have your own IP space it is possible for your provider(s) to stop announcing your IP addresses/subnet to every router in the world and e.g. only announce it to local providers. This helps to minimize the traffic to an amount which can be handled by a mitigation tool or by your Internet connection. This is specially a good mitigation method, if you’re main audience is local. e.g. 90% of your customers/clients are from the same region or country as you’re – you don’t care during an attack about IP address from x (x= foreign far away country).
A special technique of the last topic is to connect to a local Internet exchange which maybe also helps to reduce your Internet costs but in any case raises your resilience against DDOS attacks.

This covers the basics which allows you to understand and talk with your providers eye to eye. There is also a subsection of saturation attacks which does not saturate the connection but the server or firewall (e.g. syn floods) but as most small and medium companies will have only up to a one Gbit Internet connection it is unlikely that a descend server (and its operating system) or firewall is the limiting factor, most likely its the application on top of it.

application layer attacks

Which is a perfect transition to this chapter about application layer DDOS. Lets start with an example to describe this kind of attacks. Some years ago a common attack was to use the ping back feature of WordPress installations to flood a given URL with requests. I’ve seen such an attack which requests on a special URL on an target system, which did something CPU and memory intensive, which let to a successful DDOS against the application with less than 10Mbit traffic. All requests were valid requests and as the URL was an HTTPS one (which is more likely than not today) a mitigation in the network was not possible. The solution was quite easy in this case as the HTTP User Agent was WordPress which was easy to filter on the web server and had no side effects.

But this was a specific mitigation which would be easy to bypassed if the attacker sees it and changes his requests on his botnet. Which also leads to the main problem with this kind of attacks. You need to be able to block the bad traffic and let the good traffic through. Persistent attackers commonly change the attack mode – an attack is done in method 1 until you’re able to filter it out, than the attacker changes to the next method. This can go on for days. Do make it harder for an attacker it is a good idea to implement some kind of human vs bot detection method.

I’m human

The “I’m human” button from Google is quite well known and the technique behind it is that it rates the connection (source IP address, cookies (from login sessions to Google, …) and with that information it decides if the request is from a human or not. If the system is sure the request is from a human you won’t see anything. In case its sightly unsure a simple green check-mark will be shown, if its more unsure or thinks the request is by a bot it will show a CAPTCHA. So the question is can we implement something similar by ourself. Sure we can, lets dive into it.

peace time

Set an special DDOS cookie if an user is authenticated correctly, during peace time. I’ll describe the data in the cookie later in detail.

war time

So lets say, we detected an attack manually or automatically by checking the number of requests eg. against the login page. In that case the bot/human detection gets activated. Now the web server checks for each request the presence of the DDOS cookie and if the cookie can be decoded correctly. All requests which don’t contain a valid DDOS cookie get redirected temporary to a separate host e.g. https://iamhuman.example.org. The referrer is the original requested URL. This host runs on a different server (so if it gets overloaded it does not effect the normal users). This host shows a CAPTCHA and if the user solves it correctly the DDOS cookie will be set for example.org and a redirect to the original URL will be send.

Info: If you’ve requests from some trusted IP ranges e.g. internal IP address or IP ranges from partner organizations you can exclude them from the redirect to the CAPTCHA page.

sophistication ideas and cookie

An attacker could obtain a cookie and use it for his bots. To guard against it write the IP address of the client encrypted into the cookie. Also put the timestamp of the creation of the cookie encrypted into it. Also storing the username, if the cookie got created by the login process, is a good idea to check which user got compromised.

Encrypt the cookie with an authenticated encryption algorithm (e.g. AES128 GCM) and put following into it:

NONCE
typ
- L for Login cookie
- C for Captcha cookie
username
- Only if login cookie
client IP address
timestamp

The key for the encryption/decryption of the cookie is static and does not leave the servers. The cookie should be set for the whole domain to be able to protected multiple websites/applications. Also make it HttpOnly to make stealing it harder.

implementation

On the normal web server which checks the cookie following implementations are possible:

The apache web server provides a module called mod_session_* which provides some functionality but not all
The apache module rewriteMap (https://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.4/rewrite/rewritemap.html) and using „prg: External Rewriting Program“ should allow everything. Performance may be an issue.
Your own Apache module

If you know about any other method, please write a comment!

The CAPTCHA issuing host is quite simple.

Use any minimalistic website with PHP/Java/Python to create cookie
Create your own CAPTCHA or integrate a solution like Recaptcha

pro and cons

Pro
- Users than accessed authenticated within the last weeks won’t see the DDOS mitigation. Most likely these are your power users / biggest clients.
- Its possible to step up the protection gradually. e.g. the IP address binding is only needed when the attacker is using valid cookies.
- The primary web server does not need any database or external system to check for the cookie.
- The most likely case of an attack is that the cookie is not set at all which does take really few CPU resources to check.
- Sending an 302 to the bot does create only a few bytes of traffic and if the bot requests the redirected URL it on an other server and there no load on the server we want to protect.
- No change to the applications is necessary
- The operations team does not to be experts in mitigating attacks against the application layer. Simple activation is enough.
- Traffic stats local and is not send to external provider (which may be a problem for a bank or with data protections laws in Europe)
Cons
- How to handle automatic requests (API)? Make exceptions for these or block them in case of an attack?
- Problem with non browser Clients like ActiveSync clients.
- Multiple domains need multiple cookies

All in all I see it as a good mitigation method for application layer attacks and I hope the blog post did help you and your business. Please leave feedback in the comments. Thx!

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