Today, like the past few days, we have had some downtime. Apparently some script kids are enjoying themselves by targeting our server (and others). Sorry for the inconvenience.
Most of these ‘attacks’ are targeted at the database, but some are more ddos-like and can be mitigated by using a CDN. Some other Lemmy servers are using Cloudflare, so we know that works. Therefore we have chosen Cloudflare as CDN / DDOS protection platform for now. We will look into other options, but we needed something to be implemented asap.
For the other attacks, we are using them to investigate and implement measures like rate limiting etc.
Sure but maybe something less centralized/proprietary would be preferable
Nothing. DDoS mitigation is inherently an ISP or someone like cloudflare. You will not have success against anybody who knows what they are doing without their help.
This is bullshit. Just take this as an example. I found it with one quick search and there are plenty more. Perhaps we should broaden our horizons a little rather than entrusting everything to some corpos.
Well for now we’ll have to stick around with cloudflare. I’d just would like to see something managed by a decentralized network. I don’t know if it exists, it’s more of a sentiment or a general idea.
If you don’t know what a content delivery network is, here : https://www.cloudflare.com/learning/cdn/what-is-a-cdn/
A CND is very costly to run in an effective way. And because it is an intermediary server between the user and content server, the market is already pretty full. So competing with the CDN giants is practically impossible in a decentralised manner.
Because of what a CDN does (cache website elements closer to the user, protect the website against ddos…), it cannot be a cheap weak server, or it’s the one which will get overwhelmed by the ddos, or even the users.
Another limiting factor is that in decentralisation, that means different companies, and so many separate plans to pay, which is just impossible for a company.
If it was decentralized, a company would have to go and pay 100 different companies (which is more expensive, du to the server costs and each companies having their own staff to may (even if it’s just 1 person per company)) just to offer a quick access to the users around the world, which is just impossible.
I think the biggest problem with such services is that they require lots of money to run which means that any well-meaning effort will eventually end up becoming a commercial service.
It’s an interesting question but the knee jerk reaction towards decentralization isn’t always a silver bullet. Bitcoin always screamed that concept while ignoring the role of clearinghouses. Decentralization can actually compound the issue. Not to dispel the solution but good to keep these things in mind.
You’re being down voted, but a p2p cdn is something that sort of already exists. IPFS is probably the most mature. As far as I know, it’d only work for static content though. It’s also an entirely different protocol so you’d have to use some sort of local gateway or plugin to make use of it.
I have several vms and dedicated servers that I sort of use as a DIY cdn. No where near as spread out or capable as something like cloudflare, but its also not incredibly expensive to do on a small low performance scale. DDOS mitigation is another story though, generally that is best handled by large networks that can soak up the throughput.
Wanna know the beauty of Lemmy? If you don’t like how instances are ran you can create your own🙂
That’s easier said than done, DDoS mitigation requires a large amount of servers that are only really useful to persist an active DDoS attack. It’s why everyone uses Cloudflare, because of the amount of customers they serve there’s pretty much always an active attack to fend off. Decentralization wouldn’t work great for it because you would have to trust every decentralized node not to perform man in the middle attacks. But if you know of any such solution I’d love to hear it.
Yeah I see the issue but on the other side you would get a more robust network which could also be incentivised by some sort of underlying blockchain technology. The man in the middle attack could also be mitigated on a technical level.
Dunno if this guy is just so stupid or is trolling at this point. Using random tech buzzwords that have no relevance to the issue.
You had me until you mentioned blockchain technology. How would a blockchain system help in that regard, anyway?
Which viable alternative could work to mitigate ddos?
Out of my head, I think OVH offers such a service (but without free tier).
OVH is cheap but their anti-spam/abuse departments are ineffective. Too often they do not action blatant spam reports so in effect OVH is part of the problem with network abuse on the Internet. I’ve had to blackhole many of their netblocks while the people who run mxroute (solid email providers) have written about doing the same.
OVH needs to clean up their act.
HAProxy has some really good features a server admin can use locally without sending all of our data to Cloudflare or OVH.
https://www.haproxy.com/blog/application-layer-ddos-attack-protection-with-haproxy
There are many protection modules for most reverse proxies that provide basic (limiting) or sophisticated (captcha, calculation challenge, etc) DDoS protection. HAProxy is just a very powerful and easily extensible proxy.
Sure, but you still have to pay for servers to run the proxy instances on. Any DDoS of appreciable size will knock over the number of instances that lemmy.world could stand up. Interesting thought, though. Maybe CloudFlare or others use HAProxy internally? I’m actually not sure what tech they use
Well, no. Unlike the blockchain, decentralized platforms aren’t snake oil.
This explains nothing. It’s literally saying “one thing is bad, the other thing isn’t”. Try to explain why instead, if you do happen to have an explanation.
Why are the Lemmy devs asking for snake oil on their Donate page then?
Sitting comfy in a country where the financial system works for you elites is the real snake oil.
Blockchain can bring trust and thus monetisation to a decentralised network. A good example is the Tor network, which is based on voluntariness, and dVPNs, which can have the same network architecture, but where the nodes are paid for their services.
There are a couple elements that a DDOS mitigation system needs to have.
It needs to be able to absorb the raw network traffic of the attack. A purely volumetric attack seeks to just overload the network pipes that lead to the servers. This can be with junk packets that don’t even make sense to an OS kernel, but have a valid destination IP address so they get through the routers. If the DDOS mitigation system acts as a filter in front of the servers, it has to not get overloaded in the same way the routers do.
It needs to allow good traffic through to the servers. If the attack causes the pipes to just shut down and reject all traffic, then the attack has succeeded. So the mitigation system has to distinguish attack traffic from good traffic, and keep the pipes open enough to let the good traffic through.
For attacks trying to do expensive stuff on the database, or create spam posts, one useful reflex the system can have is to notice when an endpoint is doing those attacks, and then block it at the network layer.
That is not necessarily easy, and it requires control of the network ingress, which arbitrary hosting providers may not be able to provide.
Thanks to the fediverse we were all able to read and search old posts on other instances and interact freely with communities on other instances. Pretty damn great i think.
@jimmy90 @PropaGandalf And I was able to finally open up and stop being a lurker
