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Mitigating DoS Attacks with a null (or Blackhole) Route on Linux A guide
on how to lessen the damage of a DoS attack by using a null route in
Linux Written by Benjamin Cane on 2013/01/14
In a world where the Anonymous group is petitioning the US Government to make DDoS attacks a legal means of protest; For internet
facing systems the threat of Denial of Service attacks are very real.
The cold harsh reality of DoS attacks are that there is no way to stop them. While there are services out there that are designed to take the
brunt of the attack for you these costs a significant amount of money (update:
seems pretty decent). A small firms only choice
when faced with a DoS attack is to simply ride through the attack with the least amount of damage possible.
On a Linux/Unix system you can mitigate the effects of an attack by blocking the communication with the attacking ip addresses. You can
either do this by creating
or via a null route also known as a black-hole route.
Which is better null routes or IPTables rules?
The question of which is better NULL Routes or IPTables rules can be better described as "Which is more efficient for the system to
traverse the iptables rule set or the routing table". This is somewhat going to depend on the system in question. If you have a system with
thousands of routes defined in the routing table and nothing in the iptables rules than it might actually be more efficient to input an iptables
rule.
In most systems however the routing table is fairly small, in cases like this it is actually more efficient to use null routes. This is especially
true if you already have extensive iptables rules in place.
How to null routes work
When you define a route on a Linux/Unix system it tells the system in order to communicate with the specified IP address you will need to
route your network communication to this specific place.
When you define a null route it simply tells the system to drop the network communication that is designated to the specified IP address.
What this means is any TCP based network communication will not be able to be established as your server will no longer be able to send
an SYN/ACK reply. Any UDP based network communication however will still be received; however your system will no longer send any
response to the originating IP.
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In less technical terms this means your system will receive data from the attackers but no longer respond to it.
Adding and Removing a null route
How to add a null route
In our example we are receiving unwanted SSH login attempts from 192.168.0.195
root@server:~# netstat -na | grep :22
tcp 0 0 0.0.0.0:22 0.0.0.0:* LISTEN
tcp 0 0 192.168.0.197:22 192.168.0.195:57776 ESTABLISHED
To add the null route we will use the ip command
root@server:~# ip route add blackhole 192.168.0.195/32
To verify the route is in place will will use ip route show
root@server:~# ip route show
default via 192.168.0.1 dev eth0 metric 100
blackhole 192.168.0.195
After a little while the established ssh connections will time out and all subsequent connections from the blocked ip will receive the
following.
baduser@attacker:~$ ssh 192.168.0.197
ssh: connect to host 192.168.0.197 port 22: No route to host
Removing a null route
After the attack has subsided or in case you add the wrong ip you may want to remove the blackhole route. To do so we will use the ip
command again.
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root@server:~# ip route del 192.168.0.195
root@server:~# ip route show
default via 192.168.0.1 dev eth0 metric 100
Other uses for null routes
While a null route may mainly be used to mitigate DoS attacks there are some other uses. Any time you want to prevent a system from
talking to another system you can simply use null routes. I have used null routes to simulate a disaster recovery scenario while testing an
automated failover system many times.
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