DDoS protection module suggestion

[Eugaia]

Hi,

On 05/11/2010 11:51, Weibin Yao wrote:
> I think it's good to divide the determination from the Nginx. It's 
> hard to determine the IP by single Nginx whether is good or bad. 
> Actually we have 20+ reverse proxy Nginx servers in the front. Each 
> Nginx doesn't known others status. In our DDOS attack, the bad-IP's 
> request rate is a little higher than the normal request.
I agree it's a good idea to split the determination, and I think it 
might be good to put the lookup code inside the get handler for the 
variable - so that the lookup is only made if it is required.

You might want to also think about having a setting to check for the 
existence or value of a cookie before doing the IP lookup - to avoid 
unnecessary overhead.  It might also be better to handle the setting of 
the cookie value inside your Nginx module, since it would make keeping 
the generation and checking of cookie values consistent easier to manage.

You could perhaps handle the setting / value of the cookie inside Nginx, 
and have a system similar to Maxim's auth_request module - whereby a 
subrequest which would check the reCaptcha (or whatever) value, and 
return 200 for success or anything else for failure.

You could have directives like :

limit_access_cookie    [cookie_name];
limit_access_cookie_str    [cookie_value];

and you might want to add optional hashing (e.g. MD5) of the cookie 
string, to make it harder for determined hackers to get past cookie 
authentication - e.g.

limit_access_cookie_hash    md5;

I think the overhead of checking hashed values of a cookie wouldn't be 
too high, since in most cases under DDoS, the cookie wouldn't exist, so 
you'd generally only be hashing for genuine users.

Just a few ideas, anyway.  Good luck with it!

Marcus.