Hardware SYN Attack Protection For High Performance Load Balancers

SYN flooding is a simple and effective denial-of-service attack, in which an attacker sends many SYN requests to a target's server in an attempt to consume server resources and make it unresponsive to legitimate traffic. While SYN attacks have traditionally targeted web servers, they are also known to be very harmful to intermediate cloud devices, and in particular to stateful load balancers (LBs). We propose LB schemes that guarantee high throughput of one million connections per second, while supporting a high pool update rate without breaking connections, and fighting against a high rate SYN attack, of up to 10 million fake SYNs per second.