[MUD-Dev] DoS and muds

[Patrick Dughi]

On Wed, 20 Sep 2000, Josh Rollyson wrote:

> Denial of Service (DoS) attacks are unfortunally very common on my other
> addiction (IRC) and I was thinking about something, what about MUDs. 
> 
> Also has anybody had experience with players trying this, and has anybody ever
> tryed to come up with a way to prevent this ?
> 
> Right now the only way I see to logicly stop this is to threaten deletion,
> which would negate the gains from this , but probably provoke more attacks.
> 
	Well, usually a player doesn't have the bandwidth capabilities of
a mud server.  After all, you're not going to be running a decent mud over
a modem connection, probably not even ISDN/DSL/Cable.  DOS'ing a mud on a
decent link is hard.  Given that it would normally take a decent number of
external sites/etc, you should be able to garner a decent amount of
information on the attack, and send the actual owners of those sites (or
the domains that host them) the attack logs and ask them to deal with it.
SOP - standard operating procedure.

	Or you could firewall/otherwise ignore packets from those sites.

	As for a player to player basis, of course, the other party would
have to DOS the player's IP address, which would be difficult to obtain
under normal circumstances. 

	As for using it to cheat, I don't know of any muds where players
have.  Should I catch someone attempting it though, I'd do one of two
things;

	1. If i'm rushed, I'd delete their character.
	2. if I'm not rushed, I'd cripple their character in a funny way -
like have them loose levels instead of gaining them, or making their
wounds never heal, or something crippling and degrading and eventually
terminal. Of course, it would never be reversed. They'd eventually have to
restart, but not till after the amount of time it takes to realize their
character is messed up. 

	Then again, I'm sort of sadistic when I've got the energy.

						PjD




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