DDoS Protection: Layer 3/4 vs Layer 7 Attacks
Mitigate massive distributed denial-of-service floods: Layer 3/4 volumetric SYN floods and UDP reflection amplification vs Layer 7 HTTP application floods and Slowloris, BGP Anycast scrubbing centers, and eBPF/XDP wire-speed packet filtering.
01.1. The DDoS Threat Landscape: Network vs Application Layers
Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks aim to render online services unavailable by overwhelming network bandwidth, socket connection tables, or CPU/database resources. Modern attacks exceed 3.8 Terabits per second (Tbps) and hundreds of millions of packets per second (Mpps).
The OSI Layer Classification:
- Layer 3/4 Attacks (Network & Transport Layer - Volumetric / State Exhaustion):
- Focus: Overwhelming network interfaces, routing hardware, or OS kernel TCP state tables.
- Metrics: Measured in Gigabits/Terabits per second (Gbps/Tbps) and Packets per second (Mpps).
- Layer 7 Attacks (Application Layer - Semantic Exhaustion):
- Focus: Satiating application server worker threads, database connection pools, or CPU-intensive business logic.
- Metrics: Measured in Requests per second (RPS).
Global Anycast BGP & L7 WAF DDoS Mitigation Architecture 🛡️
Global Anycast BGP & L7 WAF DDoS Mitigation Architecture 🛡️
Diffusing multi-terabit volumetric floods across global Anycast edge scrubbing centers before reaching the origin.
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