Re: TCP receive window set to 0; DoS or not?

Travis Hassloch <travis.hassloch@rackspace.com> writes:

The part where it becomes a DoS is when they tie up all the listeners on a socket (e.g. apache), and nothing happens for several minutes until their connections time out. Whether intentional or not, it does have a negative effect.

Ah, that makes sense. I was assuming a deliberate attack, which is not actually implicit in the term "DoS". A deliberate denial of service is not made easier by shrinking the window. But an implementation that advertises a 0 window in lieu of sending FIN or RST can certainly deny service inadvertently by tying up resources that should have been freed. Jim Shankland