Marketing talk gives the impression of security

Do you know the facts?

For a lot of equipment, statistics are published that give the impression of excellent performance, but in the worst case the manufacturer's claims do not hold up. The result is a mere impression of security that can turn out to be disasterous if an attack does take place.

The bandwidth lie

Many manufacturers give maximum bandwidths that their equipment can handle, promising large performance reserves and thus security in the face of an attack. What is missing, though, are details about the conditions under which the results can be achieved!

That is why many firewalls and routers fail 90-95 % of the time when an attack does happen.

The reason: packets count!

Not bandwidth, but the number of packets per second reflects the load put on routers and servers. Yet the size of packets can vary greatly: from packets with a mere 44 bytes to packets having thousands of bytes, anything is possible.

An unfortunately realistic example:
Scenario Traffic Packet Packets/s  
Normally 100Mbit/s 1,000 bytes 12,000 No problem for 1 powerful server
Attack 100Mbit/s 44 bytes 200,000 !!
Failure due to 16x normal load

This applies to well-known:

  • Firewalls
  • Routers
  • Load balancers
  • Web und application servers

That's why it's important to intercept attacks before they reach these systems!

Practical example: load balancer / content switch:
The performance of a well-known load balancer is rated at 1 million concurrent sessions. It's nice to have that many visitors at one time and the equipment seems to be able to handle it.
Just imagine, though, a weak SYN flood attack at 200 Mbits: All of the sessions will be used up within 4 seconds and the equipment overloaded.

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