AWS Web/App DDOS Prevention.
The above diagram provides Infra Level DDOS (Denial-of-service attack) Prevention (BP6,BP5), Application Level DDOS Prevention(BP1,BP2,BP3) & Network level DDOS Prevention (BP4) .
BP- Best Practice for DDOS Prevention
AWS Edge LocationAWS Regions
BP3 = Amazon CloudFront
BP4 = Amazon VPC
BP2 = AWS WAF
BP5 = Elastic Load Balancing
BP1 = AWS Route 53
BP6 = Amazon EC2 with Auto Scaling
How to Help Protect Web Applications Against DDSS Attacks by Using
- Amazon CloudFront & Amazon Route 53
- Amazon WAF
- Amazon VPC
Amazon CloudFront & Amazon Route 53
Using a content delivery network (CDN) such as Amazon CloudFront to cache and serve static text and images or downloadable objects such as media files and documents is a common strategy to improve webpage load times, reduce network bandwidth costs, lessen the load on web servers, and mitigate distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks. AWS WAF is a web application firewall that can be deployed on CloudFront to help protect your application against DDoS attacks by giving you control over which traffic to allow or block by defining security rules. When users access your application, the Domain Name System (DNS) translates human-readable domain names (for example, www.example.com) to machine-readable IP addresses (for example, 192.0.2.44). A DNS service, such as Amazon Route 53, can effectively connect users’ requests to a CloudFront distribution that proxies requests for dynamic content to the infrastructure hosting your application’s endpoints.
The request-routing technology in CloudFront connects each client to the nearest edge location, as determined by continuously updated latency measurements. HTTP and HTTPS requests sent to CloudFront can be monitored, and access to your application resources can be controlled at edge locations using AWS WAF. Based on conditions that you specify in AWS WAF, such as the IP addresses that requests originate from or the values of query strings, traffic can be allowed, blocked, or allowed and counted for further investigation or remediation. The following diagram shows how static and dynamic web application content can originate from endpoint resources within AWS or your corporate data center.
Amazon WAF
AWS WAF is a web application firewall that helps detect and mitigate web application layer DDoS attacks by inspecting traffic inline. Application layer DDoS attacks use well-formed but malicious requests to evade mitigation and consume application resources. You can define custom security rules (also called web ACLs) that contain a set of conditions, rules, and actions to block attacking traffic. After you define web ACLs, you can apply them to CloudFront distributions, and web ACLs are evaluated in the priority order you specified when you configured them. Real-time metrics and sampled web requests are provided for each web ACL.
You can configure AWS WAF whitelisting or blacklisting in conjunction with CloudFront geo restriction to prevent users in specific geographic locations from accessing your application. The AWS WAF API supports security automation such as blacklisting IP addresses that exceed request limits, which can be useful for mitigating HTTP flood attacks. Use the AWS WAF Security Automations Implementation Guide to implement rate-based blacklisting.
The following diagram shows how the (a) flow of CloudFront access logs files to an Amazon S3 bucket (b) provides the source data for the Lambda log parser function © to identify HTTP flood traffic and update AWS WAF web ACLs. As CloudFront receives requests on behalf of your dynamic web application, it sends access logs to an S3 bucket, triggering the Lambda log parser. The Lambda function parses CloudFront access logs to identify suspicious behavior, such as an unusual number of requests or errors, and it automatically updates your AWS WAF rules to block subsequent requests from the IP addresses in question for a predefined amount of time that you specify.
Amazon VPC
Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC) lets you provision a logically isolated section of the AWS Cloud where you can launch AWS resources in a virtual network that you define. You have complete control over your virtual networking environment, including selection of your own IP address range, creation of subnets, and configuration of route tables and network gateways. You can use both IPv4 and IPv6 in your VPC for secure and easy access to resources and applications.
You can easily customize the network configuration of your Amazon VPC. For example, you can create a public-facing subnet for your web servers that have access to the internet.
