When dealing with volumetric DDoS attacks, traditional packet filtering is fundamentally flawed. If you rely on iptables or nftables, every packet has to be allocated an sk_buff struct in the Linux kernel before it can be evaluated and dropped. When you are being flooded with millions of packets per second (Mpps), this overhead causes instant CPU exhaustion.
To survive, you have to move your packet filtering lower in the stack.
Building a Scrubbing Node
In this tutorial, we explore how to build a dedicated DDoS scrubbing gateway using an EPY Host bare metal server. We bypass traditional firewalls by utilizing eBPF (Extended Berkeley Packet Filter) and XDP (eXpress Data Path).
XDP hooks directly into the network device driver. By loading custom eBPF programs here, we can evaluate and return XDP_DROP for malicious packets before the kernel even knows they exist.
Combined with FRRouting (FRR) to manage BGP and steer your subnets into the scrubbing node, you can create a highly resilient infrastructure capable of absorbing massive volumetric attacks.
What you will learn:
- Setting up the EPY Host high-bandwidth environment.
- Configuring FRR for traffic steering.
- Writing and attaching eBPF/XDP programs for ultra-fast packet dropping.
Dive into the code and configuration:
🔗 https://www.epyhost.com/tutorials/howto/build-ddos-scrubber-ebpf-frr/
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