Author: Mike Hearn 2011-09-15 16:21:34
Published on: 2011-09-15T16:21:34+00:00
In the given context, the focus is on the issue of how to respond to a suspected denial-of-service (DoS) attack. The author questions why they should be nice to someone if they suspect them of attempting to DoS. However, they acknowledge that sometimes something can go wrong and it may not be an actual DoS attack. The author argues against simply sending response messages in such cases, as this could give attackers another potential vector for attack. They suggest that debug.log is clear about what triggers a ban, but this may only be clear to the node owner and not the sender who could be in a better position to debug. The author mentions that it is common for protocols to return useful errors even in DoS conditions, such as http servers returning 503 Service Unavailable in overload conditions. Google goes further by sending a redirect to explain why a user has been blocked. Thus, the author suggests that there may be more effective ways to handle suspected DoS attacks without compromising security or transparency.
Updated on: 2023-06-04T19:45:50.280808+00:00