I would love if just once an admin of a fedi host under #DDoS attack would have the integrity to say:
“We are under attack. But we will not surrender to Cloudflare & let that privacy-abusing tech giant get a front-row view of all your traffic (including passwords & DMs) while centralizing our decentralized community. We apologize for the downtime while we work on solving this problem in a way that uncompromisingly respects your privacy and does not harm your own security more than the attack itself.”
This is inspired by the recent move of #LemmyWorld joining Cloudflare’s walled garden to thwart a DDoS atk.
So of course the natural order of this thread is to discuss various Cloudflare-free solutions. Such as:
- Establish an onion site & redirect all Tor traffic toward the onion site. 1.1. Suggest that users try the onion site when the clearnet is down— and use it as an opportunity to give much needed growth to the Tor network.
- Establish 3+ clearnet hosts evenly spaced geographically on VPSs. 2.1. Configure DNS to load-balance the clearnet traffic.
- Set up tar-pitting to affect dodgy-appearing traffic. (yes I am doing some serious hand-waving here on this one… someone plz pin down the details of how to do this)
- You already know the IPs your users use (per fedi protocols), so why not use that info to configure the firewall during attacks? (can this be done without extra logging, just using pre-existing metadata?)
- Disable all avatar & graphics. Make the site text-only when a load threshold is exceeded. Graphic images are what accounts for all the heavy-lifting and they are the least important content (no offense @jerry@infosec.exchange!). (do fedi servers tend to support this or is hacking needed?)
- Temporarily defederate from all nodes to focus just on local users being able to access local content. (not sure if this makes sense)
- Take the web client offline and direct users to use a 3rd party app during attacks, assuming this significantly lightens the workload.
- Find another non-Cloudflared fedi instance that has a smaller population than your own node but which has the resources for growth, open registration, similar philosophies, and suggest to your users that they migrate to it. Most fedi admins have figured out how to operate without Cloudflare, so promote them.
^ This numbering does /not/ imply a sequence of steps. It’s just to give references to use in replies. Not all these moves are necessarily taken together.
What other incident response actions do not depend on Cloudflare?
Out of your list, I would say that only load balancing would really make a difference, and only up to a certain point, depending on the number of hosts. It really takes time to introduce a meaningful DDOS prevention mechanism, as it may require both development and DevOps time to implement. Perhaps in the future, as Lemmy evolves, we will see less reliance on Cloudflare, but right now, we don’t have many options. Lastly, you also have to consider the costs in terms of time and money.
Yup, there’s a reason there aren’t a ton of FOSS or small DDoS prevention/protection tools/services out there, and even large tech companies that may have the resources to develop their own rely on providers like Cloudflare instead. Also, to re-iterate another comment in this post, you don’t necessarily need to allow cloudflare to see your encrypted traffic if you just want DDoS protection.