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The SYN flooding attack is a denial-of-service method that exploits the design of the Internet’s Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) three-way handshake for establishing connections by exhausting a server’s allocated state for a listening server application’s pending connections, preventing legitimate connections from being established with the server application.
Background
SYN flooding attacks were first widely publicized by a Phrack magazine article in 1996 [1], and also began being witnessed on the Internet.
The attack exploits the common policies of operating system TCP implementations in enforcing a maximum number of TCP connections in the SYN-RECEIVED state for a particular listening server application. By rapidly sending TCP SYN segments to a server, the attacker causes the number of connections in the SYN-RECEIVED state to reach the maximum, and incoming connection requests from legitimate clients are...
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Recommended Reading
daemon9, route, and infinity, Project Neptune, Phrack Magazine, 7(48) file 13 of 18, July 1996
Eddy W (2006) Defenses against TCP SYN flooding attacks. Cisco Internet Protocol J 9(4)
Eddy W (2007) TCP SYN flooding attacks and common mitigations. RFC 4987
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© 2011 Springer Science+Business Media, LLC
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Eddy, W.M. (2011). SYN Flood Attack. In: van Tilborg, H.C.A., Jajodia, S. (eds) Encyclopedia of Cryptography and Security. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-5906-5_276
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-5906-5_276
Publisher Name: Springer, Boston, MA
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