Stefano Demiliani WeBlog

RSS Traffic like a DDos Attack...

This is the beginning of a big problem, expecially for the future and for sites with lots of accesses...

On an article just appeared on InfoWorld, Chad Dickenson points the attention to a problem: RSS feed Readers are useful for obtaining informations in real time, but they can have a dangerous behaviour. He observed that  "every hour, Infoworld sees a massive surge of RSS newsreader activity that has all the characteristics of a distributed DoS attack. So many requests in such a short period of time are creating scaling issues".

We can observ this problem also on other sites and I think it's time to think to avoid these types of problems.

The basic problem with RSS now is that it's based on a "pull" method: every RSS clients that wants to retrieve informations have to make periodic requests to the server only for see if there's something available. You can see that, if the requests are a big quantity, some problems may occour.

Solutions or ideas to avoid this? Maybe not a "pull" method, but a "push" method: if the feed source was able to push the feeds to the clients, there will be a significant decrease of traffic on the network. Obviously, this type of actions is not so simple... for example, clients must be subscribed to the feed server, so a way of subscribtion is necessary. The server obviously will push the informations only on subscribed (and recognized) clients.

Yes... recognized... a way of authentication I think is necessary (maybe a key exchangement between news client and news server).

These are only ideas... this is a problem that must be take in consideration, NOW!