GCP Google Cloud Agents: How GoogleCloudArmor Defends Against Massive DDoS Attacks
In the network security circle, there is a sword of Damocles hanging over the heads of all independent stations, cross-border games and SaaS vendors--
DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service)
.
Today's hackers are less and less wude. In the past, hackers could paralyze a small computer room by hitting dozens of Gbps of traffic. Now, botnets are used to initiate
L7 (application layer) HTTP flood attack
At every turn, hundreds of millions of requests per second (RPS) can instantly flush your server cluster and database with no residue left. The most disgusting thing is that you have to pay sky-high bills for the bandwidth and traffic generated by these malicious attacks.
Today, instead of reading the rigid manufacturer's white paper, we directly pulled the hood to talk about Google Cloud's top "national shield"--
Google Cloud Armor
. See how it stands at the forefront of the global network and helps you spike those massive DDoS attacks.
1. Core Chassis: Why Cloud Armor Can't Wear It "?
Many brothers build their own computer rooms or buy services from small cloud vendors. What they fear most is that the physical bandwidth is full. Hackers hit your 10G exit with 100G of traffic, and the firewall behind you will have to stop because "the road is blocked".
However, Cloud Armor dares to claim to be a "bulletproof vest" and his confidence comes from Google's terror.
Global Network Volume
.
Bringing the battlefield to your doorstep: Cloud Armor isn't deployed in front of your Compute Engine, it's soldered directly to Google's Edge POP.
Amazing throughput: Google carries the world's Google search, YouTube and Gmail traffic every day, and the total bandwidth of its global network is unimaginable. When hackers launch Tbps-level network layer (L3/L4) flood attacks (such as SYN Flood or UDP rebound attacks), Cloud Armor does not even need to alarm your source station and directly clean and devour these garbage traffic on edge nodes all over the world.
Old Bird's Vernacular: Hackers thought they had used thousands of troops. In fact, their traffic did not even touch the edge of Google's intranet and was swallowed up at the edge of the public network.
2. Core Superpower: Adaptive Protection (ML Adaptive Defense)
The traditional firewall (WAF) is extremely rigid in anti-DDoS, and all depends on manual operation and maintenance to write rules. For example: "If a single IP requests more than 50 times a second, it will be blacked out."
But now hackers are very smart. They control hundreds of thousands of clean home broiler IP's around the world, and each IP only sends 2 requests per second. Judging from a single IP, it is completely legal, but the combination of hundreds of thousands of IP is hundreds per second.
Ten thousand HTTP flood attacks. At this time, the traditional rules directly catch blind.
In order to solve this pain point, Cloud Armor offered a killer--
Adaptive protection (Adaptive Protection)
:
As shown above, its defense process is as smart as a special forces soldier:
Establish a baseline (Baseline): As long as you turn on this feature, Google's AI model will silently observe what normal access to your application looks like every day (e. g. which URLs users like to access and what are the characteristics of the request header).
Millisecond-level anomaly detection: When the hacker army raids, the AI will instantly find an abnormal surge in traffic and dissect the attack traffic clearly within a few seconds.
Automatically generate "dimension reduction strike" rules: AI will automatically generate a complex CEL (Common Expression Language) rule, such as: "As long as the request has a specific JA3/JA4 browser fingerprint and the access path contains a certain feature, it will be blocked." It will directly play this rule to the operation and maintenance, you only need to confirm with one click (even can be equipped with automatic application), the global node will take effect synchronously within one minute, accurately cut off hackers, and the real users will not be affected at all.
3. Line of Defense: How can Cloud Armor be configured to "keep the enemy out of the country"?
In the actual production environment, blindly opening is not enough, the old bird will generally put Cloud Armor according
Three lines of defense
to configure:
First Line of Defense: Network Layer and Geolocation Interception (IP & Geo Blocking)
Geofence: If your SaaS business is only in Europe and the United States, then decisively add a highest priority rule to Cloud Armor: all traffic in other regions except for specific countries in Europe and the United States (Deny). In a word, hackers from non-business areas have no chance to shake hands directly.
Threat Intel: Bind Google's official threat intelligence database (Google Threat Intelligence) to directly block the world's known Tor anonymous network exports, malicious crawlers and contaminated proxy IP with one click.
The second line of defense: fine current limiting (Rate Limiting)
Don't just make a stiff "ban", learn to use it.
Traffic throttling
.
In Cloud Armor rules, you can set: for specific sensitive pages (such
/login
or
/register
), single client IP allows 20 requests in 1 minute. Once exceeded, the 403 is not returned directly, but the subsequent request is thrown into
"The Rate Limit Exceeded Action"
, force them to fill in the reCAPTCHA verification code, or directly
Redirect to a static "in-line" web page. This can greatly consume the hacker's broiler resources.
The third line of defense: pre-configured WAF rules (to prevent application vulnerabilities)
DDoS is often accompanied by application-layer vulnerability detection. Cloud Armor has a full set of built-in
OWASP Top 10 Preconfigured Rules
(supports the latest CRS 4.22 standard), covering SQL injection (SQLi), cross-site scripting (XSS), and various remote code execution (RCE).
Set these rules as "Preview Mode" and run for a few days. After confirming that there is no accidental killing of ordinary people, they are decisively cut into "Deny Mode" and the safety factor of the website is directly full.
4. operation and maintenance of the old bird's "life-saving money account"
Finally, an account must be calculated with management or architect:
Is Cloud Armor expensive?
Regular Cloud Armor is billed by the number of rules and requests. However, if you are facing a large-scale offshore business (such as games and e-commerce) that is truly public-oriented and easily targeted, it is strongly recommended to subscribe.
Cloud Armor Enterprise (Enterprise Managed Protection)
.
Although it has a fixed monthly fee package, it contains a crucial "economic security agreement" (DDoS Bill Protection) ":
If your website is hit by a frenzied Tbps-level large-scale DDoS attack, Google will fully waive/compensate you for the extremely horrible, hundreds of T-level return traffic fees and request fees generated by global edge nodes during the attack.
This is the equivalent of buying a "no-deductible commercial insurance" for your technical assets ". Hackers want to brush up your bill to force you to compromise, in front of Google's dimension reduction strike, completely turned into a joke.
Summary
To deal with DDoS attacks, it is never by spelling server configuration, but by spelling
Whose chassis is big and whose shield is smart
.
Wear Google's "world-class body armor" to protect your Search and YouTube outside your load balancing (LB). Let Cloud Armor keep the wind and rain and malice at the edge of the world, so that the back-end business can safely lie and make money.
