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Date:      Fri, 5 Sep 2025 00:26:08 +0200
From:      "Peter 'PMc' Much" <pmc@citylink.dinoex.sub.org>
To:        freebsd-net@freebsd.org
Subject:   Successful syn flooding DoS
Message-ID:  <aLoSANVhfontVd3e@disp.intra.daemon.contact>

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Folks,

 today I fell victim to a syn flooding party; one of my machines
went offline and needed a full reset to recover.

Why:
If somebody sends me a SYN (might be spoofed), I reply with SYN-ACK.
If there is a portforwarder in the path, then libalias will
consider this state of affairs a fully established connection, and
preserve the record, for... a day.

If somebody send me 100 SYN packets per second, then after a few
hour the libalias will have accumulated millions of these records.
They go into a tailq. And at that size, the network receiving
thread searching through that will run at 100% CPU.

That receiving thread is a network interrupt, prio 8, so if the
machine is a single vcore KVM, it won't do much else anymore.

As a quick measure I have now tried to change libalias to require a
bit more data before making the timeout that long. But in the
meantime the idiots have stopped their nonsense, so there is no
test.

Comments, anybody?

cheerio,
PMc



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