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Comment by vixsomnis | Hacker News Reader

Interestingly enough, if the attacks never stop (which is a possibility), the engineers at GitHub might still come up with a way to effectively nullify DDOS and continue their normal operations.

Which would be a massive advance in cyberdefense. It's unlikely, but it would be a great example of "natural selection" (via their intelligent engineers' efforts) at work.

It will no doubt take ingenuity, but I don't think any other website than GitHub is in the position to do this. Especially right now.

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Nullifying DDOS doesn't take ingenuity, it takes a big wallet, which Github no doubt has, but let's not pretend that its some engineering feat. If it was, a small company being ddosed would have a chance at fending it off all the same, but that's just simply not the case.

> Nullifying DDOS doesn't take ingenuity, it takes a big wallet

The problem in this instance relates not to the absolute size of Github's wallet, but the relative size of its wallet compared to whoever is sponsoring the attack. State-sponsored actors (if that is what is happening here) have many dollars at their disposal.

I'm not well-versed in the technical details of defending from DDOS, but unless it's a mathematical NP-complete problem, they have a chance.

Honestly, if you start by saying you're not well versed, how can you confidently make a statement about whether it is possible or not?

Large scale DDOSes are usually the most damaging when they're high bandwidth (Layer 7 attacks can usually gradually be mitigated by well written firewall rules placed on the proximity of the network). When a DDOS is just maxing out the bandwidth coming into your network or sometimes even data center, no amount of clever algorithms can make your pipes bigger. For that, you need money.

*edit fixed a minor typo

I'm not confident. I'm saying there could be a way to mitigate DDOS that we don't understand yet.

It's unlikely, but possible.

It can be a weakness in a widely deployed, vital protocol and that would be technically impossible to fix- not because of the technology but because altering the protocol would either require everyone on the Internet to change their software, or it'd preclude certain types of communication, or both.

What does NP have to do with it? NP-problems are perfectly solvable, it's just that they take more than polynomial time to solve them relative to the size of the inputs. You were probably looking for something like "not computable" for when there is no possible algorithm to solve a problem.

DDoS attacks are a dynamic and changing problem. It's usually like playing whack-a-mole.

There's no way GitHub is going to develop a solution that magically "prevents all DDoS attacks".

Ha this is actually interesting. I'm doing a research project at school on DDOS mitigation with AITF. This seems like exactly something github could use right about now.

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