Apache DoS - is Varnish affected?

[Fabian Keil]

"Poul-Henning Kamp" <phk at phk.freebsd.dk> wrote:

> In message <4A3BA393.3010306 at loman.net>, Nick Loman writes:
> >I would guess that Varnish isn't affected by this, but does anyone know 
> >for sure? Does Varnish protect against this attack in all cases if you 
> >have Apache as your backend?
> >
> >http://isc.sans.org/diary.html?storyid=6601
> 
> Varnish will abandon the connection after a fixed number of header
> lines.
> 
> This attack is more or less exactly _why_ varnish has a fixed limit
> on HTTP headers.
> 
> I won't claim that varnish is imune, but the impact should be manageable.
> 
> Systems using "http accept filters" (FreeBSD possibly others) the Varnish
> (or apache) will never even see these connections in the first place.

Actually I think accf_http(9) would only delay the attack.

While the man page doesn't mention it, accf_http passes
incomplete requests to the userland if its buffer is full.

Fabian
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