Centralization was absolutely the best answer to that problem and will be for a long time. Almost nobody but fortune 500 companies would be able to survive a DDoS otherwise.
1) are way more expensive than Cloudflare
2) suck at DDOS mitigation (there's a lot more to it than just bandwidth)
3) don't care much about DDOS mitigation (it is a side business from their actual business, which is edge caching)
4) drop customers who actually get hit with big DDOS attacks (see #3 above--they will always prioritize caching customers over DDOS customers)
EDIT- oh and I forgot to say that if your site is HTTPS, you will have to give Akamai your keys, just like you do with Cloudflare.
> You don't solve a DDoS problem by having less capacity than your attacker and most individual companies can never afford the amount of bandwidth that is at Cloudflare's disposal.
You can have less capacity than Akamai (many excellent providers have less) and still serve this purpose.
"worked around" is more appropriate, and introduced huge problems with their workaround.
The correct solution is to punish ISPs that permit this behavior to continue unchecked. We need offense, not defense. Any ISP that doesn't detect and kill DDoS participants needs to be severely throttled by other ISPs. Organizations like the FCC should be tackling this and levying fines against US-based ISPs for non-compliance and lobbying for foreign policies that punish foreign ISPs.
Oh wait now blahflix needs to pay $$$ to get special privileges. Shit gets hairy real quick.
Suppose DDOS happens from iot devices. One of this is an important medical device that got hacked. Do you auto shut it down and block it's traffic. What about the life critical device under same IP through NAT that is secure also getting blocked?
ISPs should remain dumb pipes. You really don't want to give comcast more power.
Well, presumably companies have arrangements with their ISPs for expected usage and such. There can be a grace period as well, when you hit up the user and say "hey, you're using a lot of bw, is all well?" You also combine this with abuse reports from the victims if a DDoS is in fact underway. I don't think it's bad for an ISP to establish trust with a customer, either, this already happens with things like DMCA requests.
>Suppose DDOS happens from iot devices. One of this is an important medical device that got hacked. Do you auto shut it down and block it's traffic. What about the life critical device under same IP through NAT that is secure also getting blocked?
Life critical devices aren't exposed to the internet. IoT users should get throttled and receive a comminication from their ISP telling them they have a malicious device on their network with advice on how to fix the problem.
If someone puts "an important medical device" on a network directly accessible from the internet, or on the same network as other IOT crap devices, they should be banned from ever working with computers.
If you are under attack and nobody is forging their origin, it's only a matter of you talking with your ISP to block the offenders.
You're proposing that I protect my site by rewriting the rules for internet across the entire planet and punishing every single visitor (thousands upon thousands!!) who doesn't play by some new arbitrary rules that we then have to get everyone to agree on.
No, the ISPs should not be made to correct this kind of behavior, because it will be an eternal game of cat and mouse, and we've proven that the attackers can get around said blocks quite easily. Heck, often the "attackers" are grandma and grandpa types that clicked on a bad link and didn't know any better. Instead, we're taking the right approach here: identify bad incoming traffic at the destination, and drop it before it hits the backing servers. That's a solution we can actually reasonably apply.
I don't agree with a lot of what Cloud Flare is doing, and I really wish we had more than one service like it that was as popular as they are, but they are doing good work. They're solving a huge need within the industry. I believe there should be more competition in the space, but I refuse to believe that the overall approach is inherently bad when it obviously works.
There is no way to get from our current situation to the world you propose - there will be never be a quorum from ISPs (or governments) on this sort of standard. It's a tragedy of the commons and no single participant has enough leverage or interest in a new status quo.
Centralization comes with risks, but I think the risk is absolutely acceptable in this case until we come up with a better, decentralized approach to attacks that normal people can afford.
I love them very much.
If they fuck up too often i can stop using them in 5 minutes, this is just perfect.
Telia eats it quite regularly, but not often at this magnitude.
That being said, I agree that centralization sucks, and I'm thinking about symbolically moving my tiny blog off Cloudflare for this reason. The ridiculous thing is that the origin is on GitHub Pages, so I'll have to move off there as well to be coherent.
The crazy thing is people actually bought it.