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ADC
14.1 - Current Release 13.1 13.0 12.1
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HTTP denial-of-service protection

August 20, 2024
Contributed by: 
C C S

Warning

HTTP Denial of Service Protection (HDoSP) is deprecated from Citrix ADC 12.0 build 56.20 onwards and as an alternative, Citrix recommends you to use AppQoE. For more information, see AppQoE.

Internet hackers can bring down a site by sending a surge of GET requests or other HTTP-level requests. HTTP Denial-of-Service (HTTP Dos) Protection provides an effective way to prevent such attacks from being relayed to your protected Web servers. The HTTP DoS feature also ensures that a Citrix ADC appliance located between the internet cloud and your Web servers is not brought down by an HTTP DoS attack.

Most attackers on the Internet use applications that discard responses to reduce computation costs, and minimize their size to avoid detection. The attackers focus on speed, devising ways to send attack packets, establish connections or send HTTP requests as rapidly as possible.

Real HTTP clients such as Internet Explorer, Firefox, or NetScape browsers can understand HTML Refresh meta tags, Java scripts, and cookies. In standard HTTP the clients have most of these features enabled. However, the dummy clients used in DoS attacks cannot parse the response from the server. If malicious clients attempt to parse and send requests intelligently, it becomes difficult for them to launch the attack aggressively.

When the Citrix ADC appliance detects an attack, it responds to a percentage of incoming requests with a Java or HTML script containing a simple refresh and cookie. (You configure that percentage by setting the Client Detect Rate parameter.) Real Web browsers and other Web-based client programs can parse this response and then resend a POST request with the cookie. DoS clients drop the Citrix ADC appliance’s response instead of parsing it, and their requests are therefore dropped as well.

Even when a legitimate client responds correctly to the Citrix ADC appliance’s refresh response, the cookie in the client’s POST request may become invalid in the following conditions:

  • If the original request was made before the Citrix ADC appliance detected the DoS attack, but the resent request was made after the appliance had come under attack.
  • When the client’s think time exceeds four minutes, after which the cookie becomes invalid.

Both of these scenarios are rare, but not impossible. In addition, the HTTP DoS protection feature has the following limitations:

  • Under an attack, all POST requests are dropped, and an error page with a cookie is sent.
  • Under an attack, all embedded objects without a cookie are dropped, and an error page with a cookie is sent.

The HTTP DoS protection feature may affect other Citrix ADC features. Using DoS protection for a particular content switching policy, however, creates additional overhead because the policy engine must find the policy to be matched. There is some overhead for SSL requests due to SSL decryption of the encrypted data. Because most attacks are not on a secure network, though, the attack is less aggressive.

If you have implemented priority queuing, while it is under attack a Citrix ADC appliance places requests without proper cookies in a low-priority queue. Although this creates overhead, it protects your Web servers from false clients. HTTP DoS protection typically has minimal effect on throughput, since the test JavaScript is sent for a small percentage of requests only. The latency of requests is increased, because the client must re-issue the request after it receives the JavaScript. These requests are also queued

To implement HTTP DoS protection, you enable the feature and define a policy for applying this feature. Then you configure your services with the settings required for HTTP DoS. You also bind a TCP monitor to each service and bind your policy to each service to put it into effect.

HTTP denial-of-service protection
August 20, 2024
Contributed by: 
C C S
August 20, 2024
Contributed by: 
C C S

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