Rolling With The Punches: Shifting Attack Tactics & Dropping Packets Faster & Cheaper At The Edge

This post details the evolution of Cloudflare's DDoS mitigation strategies in response to shifting attack trends. It introduces 'dosd', a decentralized, edge-analyzed, edge-enforced DDoS mitigation system designed to detect and mitigate smaller, localized attacks rapidly (0-3 seconds). It also introduces 'IP Jails', a Gatebot capability that efficiently mitigates rate-intensive HTTP DDoS attacks by dropping connections at Layer 4 instead of Layer 7, significantly reducing CPU, memory, and bandwidth consumption. The post provides examples and metrics demonstrating the effectiveness of these systems in handling both L3/L4 and L7 DDoS attacks.