Re: SynFloods and CPU usage with and without iptables. Confused!

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Payam,

Thanks for your reply!

Unfortunately the attack subsided and I did not get a packet log with tcpdump , I can tell you also that during such attack once I disabled iptables I was no longer logging anything. Dmesg all i see is:

possible SYN flooding on port 80. Sending cookies.
possible SYN flooding on port 80. Sending cookies.
possible SYN flooding on port 80. Sending cookies.
possible SYN flooding on port 80. Sending cookies.
possible SYN flooding on port 80. Sending cookies.
possible SYN flooding on port 80. Sending cookies.
[....]

I just realized that another machine of ours got attacked, about 20mbits and it brought the public interface down immediately . The graphs showed a CPU consumption of 14-20%.. then attack subsided 30 min later. This other machine also has syn cookieshowever dmesg didnt show any warning about it using syn cookies.. but it is enabled:

[root@w1 ~]# sysctl -a | grep syn
fs.quota.syncs = 0
net.ipv4.tcp_syn_retries = 5
net.ipv4.tcp_synack_retries = 5
net.ipv4.tcp_syncookies = 1
net.ipv4.tcp_max_syn_backlog = 1024
net.ipv6.conf.all.max_desync_factor = 600
net.ipv6.conf.default.max_desync_factor = 600
net.ipv6.conf.lo.max_desync_factor = 600
net.ipv6.conf.eth0.max_desync_factor = 600
net.ipv6.conf.eth1.max_desync_factor = 600



To me this confirms they are exausting something else ... Do you have any other suggestion?

Thanks

JP







On 05/04/2013 12:00 PM, Payam Chychi wrote:
Wait are you logging the attack? That will cause high cpu utilization, specially via syslog

Anything on dmsg?

--
Payam Chychi
Network Engineer / Security Specialist

On Saturday, 4 May, 2013 at 10:29 AM, Payam Chychi wrote:

Do you have a capture of the attack? Does not make sense that cpu would go high for a normal synflood attack

--
Payam Chychi
Network Engineer / Security Specialist

On Saturday, 4 May, 2013 at 10:15 AM, Alex Flex wrote:

Hello Netfilter,

Ive been receiving lately two types of syn floods on an Intel Xeon
2.4ghz + 4GB machine exclusively dedicated for this and the findings
have me very confused:
I have syn cookies enabled and checked to be working as per syslog.
This machine has a 10gigabit uplink so I know that networking isnt a
bottleneck here (bandwith or router hardware based).

SCENARIO 1: the first attack was: 105mbits @ 330,000 pps and it brought
the machine to 100% CPU usage and over 50% packetloss Load average 12.
At that time it had a simple iptables script that that had less then 5
blacklists of port 80 ips and then a ACCEPT On port 80, nothing fancy. I
disabled iptables and load average went down immediately to 8 but there
was still high packet loss so basically we where DoSed efficiently.

SCENARIO 2: After that the attacker sent only a 30mbit synflood @ 70,000
pps .. Now i had less packet loss, and interestingly with iptables
enabled it would create almost immediate packetloss. At this time I
tried to explore installing conntrack-tools information about the state
table. conntrack said that with iptables enabled and syncookies the
maximum entries where 1300 ONLY... and a CPU usage reported by HTOP of
40% on SI. After that I decided to drop iptables all together and
immediately port 80 started flowing with normal traffic (we have less
than 1mbit clean traffic) . No packetloss was present, because iptables
was disabled conntrack did not report any entries and netstat-na |wc -l
reported less than 300.

Questions:

a.) Can anybody suggest why there is so much CPU overhead when iptables
is turned on and dealing with such PPS? Is this normal? Usually what CPU
usage does a syn flood cookie enabled take?

b.) Is there a chance that the attacker exausted something else iam not
seeing?


Thanks for the help guys

Alex
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