90 Million Max Firewall States Possible?
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Hello, I've done some brief testing with 20 million maximum firewall states on pfsense and it seems to work fine but the 4 core cpu that was assigned to the pfsense vm didn't cut it, instead it was constantly crashing pfsense when i was stressing with a 20 GBPS attack i think because the cpu is being overloaded. The max firewall states is set at 20,000,000
I was wondering if i could do the same thing with 96gb of ram and a 12 core cpu, and would the cpu be sufficient? -
Depends on the attack. FreeBSD has some O(nm) algorithms that can effectively create an O(n^2) situation. 90mil^2 = 8,100,000,000,000,000 operations. Assuming one cycle average per operation, that's 675,000 seconds or 7.8days of work for a quad-core 3ghz system. And with these events occurring at a rate of (20Gb/s)/64bytes=39,062,500/sec, you will acquire 834,760 days of computational work in one second. Even if they got the algorithm to O(n), you're still talking about 914 days of work per second. Even O(log n) would be 3 days of work per second. Anything less than O(1) will probably have issues with 90mil states.
On the other hand, most of FreeBSD's network algorithms are O(1), but an attacker worth their salt won't be attacking these, they'll be going after the painful ones.
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Depends on the attack. FreeBSD has some O(nm) algorithms that can effectively create an O(n^2) situation. 90mil^2 = 8,100,000,000,000,000 operations. Assuming one cycle average per operation, that's 675,000 seconds or 7.8days of work for a quad-core 3ghz system. And with these events occurring at a rate of (20Gb/s)/64bytes=39,062,500/sec, you will acquire 834,760 days of computational work in one second. Even if they got the algorithm to O(n), you're still talking about 914 days of work per second. Even O(log n) would be 3 days of work per second. Anything less than O(1) will probably have issues with 90mil states.
On the other hand, most of FreeBSD's network algorithms are O(1), but an attacker worth their salt won't be attacking these, they'll be going after the painful ones.
So what would be the best solution to my problem, would i need alot more processing power, a better cpu? Would it still prevent at least a 60gpbs ddos attack with 90 Million states and 12 cores? All i'm looking to withstand is DNS, SSYN, NTP, Chargen attack
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you don't want any software firewall to handle ddos. you need specialized hardware for this & is best dealt with upstream.
imho its a waste of time & money to even attempt this with pfSense
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Depends on the attack. FreeBSD has some O(nm) algorithms that can effectively create an O(n^2) situation. 90mil^2 = 8,100,000,000,000,000 operations. Assuming one cycle average per operation, that's 675,000 seconds or 7.8days of work for a quad-core 3ghz system. And with these events occurring at a rate of (20Gb/s)/64bytes=39,062,500/sec, you will acquire 834,760 days of computational work in one second. Even if they got the algorithm to O(n), you're still talking about 914 days of work per second. Even O(log n) would be 3 days of work per second. Anything less than O(1) will probably have issues with 90mil states.
On the other hand, most of FreeBSD's network algorithms are O(1), but an attacker worth their salt won't be attacking these, they'll be going after the painful ones.
So what would be the best solution to my problem, would i need alot more processing power, a better cpu? Would it still prevent at least a 60gpbs ddos attack with 90 Million states and 12 cores? All i'm looking to withstand is DNS, SSYN, NTP, Chargen attack
If you can accord 8,451,945,000,000,000,000 quad core 3ghz CPUs to process that 64Gb/s of line rate DDOS, go for it. Personally, I don't have 8 Sextillion dollars burning a hole in my pocket.
In case you're wondering
Billion, Trillion, Quadrillion, Quintillion, SextillionDDOS will continue to hurt until they get some O(1) algorithms.
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A firewall is not a DDoS mitigation device. Some cases can be helped by a firewall, but as has been mentioned, it's a problem best solved upstream or with specialized hardware that is dedicated only to DDoS mitigation.
