Apache attacked by a "slow loris"

Posted Jun 24, 2009 15:05 UTC (Wed) by epa (subscriber, #39769)
In reply to: Apache attacked by a "slow loris" by mjthayer
Parent article: Apache attacked by a "slow loris"

It has often been pointed out that TCP seems a poor basis for a stateless protocol like HTTP. (To be fair, the HTTP headers can be quite big and you need to POST data sometimes, making a request too big to fit in a single UDP datagram. But it's interesting to wonder what the world would look like if Tim B-L had chosen the other path...)

Apache attacked by a "slow loris"

Posted Jun 25, 2009 16:25 UTC (Thu) by iabervon (subscriber, #722) [Link]

HTTP is actually quite stateful: each connection is in the state of expecting responses to particular requests; it's really handy not having to invent TCP in order to figure out what response goes to what request, what's coming back when and where, what you're still waiting for, what you should give up on and start over requesting, etc. Once you have any state at all, it's much easier to use TCP than it is to use UDP and deal with the state at a higher level. Simply getting responses routed back to requesters through firewalls and NAT with UDP is a pain and requires a lot of protocol-specific analysis in a lot of devices.

HTTP is "stateless" only in that you often return to the default state, not in that you never leave the default state. UDP is only really appropriate for cases where you don't care if your message is received and you won't get a response to it.