DEV Community

Discussion on: Boring a server to death - The Slow Loris Attack

Collapse
 
elmuerte profile image
Michiel Hendriks • Edited

The reason why is that the guys and gals working on Apache Server, decided that when a new connection comes, it will be served by a new thread.

That's a rather unfair statement. When Apache HTTPD was first created, in 1995, epoll() did not exist on sockets.

The MPM event module exists for quite a while now (2012), and it does not have a major issue with slowloris. But just like with the other non-prefork MPMs, not all Apache modules are safe to be used with the event MPM. Most notably mod_php was not thread safe.

Collapse
 
kalkwst profile image
Kostas Kalafatis

Truth is that I was not trying to point fingers at Apache for bad desing or whatever.

The real point is that a design choice made in 1995, became an attack vector 14 years later ☺