This means that Slowloris is capable of being effective even when standard enterprise-grade IPS and IDS systems are in place. Because of this, existing IPS and IDS solutions that rely on signatures to detect attacks will generally not recognize Slowloris. Slowloris is different from typical denials of service in that Slowloris traffic utilizes legitimate HTTP traffic, and does not rely on using special 'bad' HTTP requests that exploit bugs in specific HTTP servers. Networks that utilize hardware load balancers and alternative Web servers may still be vulnerable to Slowloris.īefore we review Slowloris mitigations, let's review what makes Slowloris different from other denials of service. In addition, other supposedly non-vulnerable HTTP servers and proxies can be affected by this denial of service using non-default Slowloris settings. In particular, it's important to note that hardware load balancers typically do not protect against this denial of service without additional configuration, which we detail below. One of the primary goals of this document is to dispel some of these myths and provide reliable information on properly mitigating against Slowloris and other similar denials of service. It's important to note that, based on our testing, much of the conventional wisdom about supposedly non-vulnerable configurations is misleading at best. There has been much discussion on the Internet relating to what HTTP servers, HTTP proxies, and network configurations are not affected by Slowloris. IBM WebSphere Edge Server Caching Proxy.

Slowloris was written by 'RSnake', and was announced in a ha. blog post on June 17, 2009.Īs of July 5, 2009, vulnerable HTTP servers and proxies include: Once server resources are exhausted, the server will no longer be able to respond to legitimate traffic. It operates by repeatedly initiating several hundred valid HTTP requests to the server, and keeping these connections open using a minimal amount of TCP traffic, in order to consume server resources. Slowloris is the name of a perl-based HTTP client that can be used as a denial of service against Apache-based HTTP servers and the squid caching proxy server. Get an awesome Funtoo container and support Funtoo! See Funtoo Containers for more information.

How to perform slowloris attack