mod_evasive howto step by step

Tuesday, 22 August 2006 22:39

mod_evasive is an evasive maneuvers module for Apache to provide evasive action in the event of an HTTP DoS or DDoS attack or brute force attack. It is also designed to be a detection and network management tool, and can be easily configured to talk to ipchains, firewalls, routers, and etcetera. mod_evasive presently reports abuses via email and syslog facilities.

Detection is performed by creating an internal dynamic hash table of IP Addresses and URIs, and denying any single IP address from any of the following:

Requesting the same page more than a few times per second
Making more than 50 concurrent requests on the same child per second
Making any requests while temporarily blacklisted (on a blocking list)

This method has worked well in both single-server script attacks as well as distributed attacks, but just like other evasive tools, is only as useful to the point of bandwidth and processor consumption (e.g. the amount of bandwidth and processor required to receive/process/respond to invalid requests), which is why it's a good idea to integrate this with your firewalls and routers for maximum protection.

This module instantiates for each listener individually, and therefore has a built-in cleanup mechanism and scaling capabilities. Because of this per-child design, legitimate requests are never compromised (even from proxies and NAT addresses) but only scripted attacks. Even a user repeatedly clicking on 'reload' should not be affected unless they do it maliciously. mod_evasive is fully tweakable through the Apache configuration file, easy to incorporate into your web server, and easy to use. from http://www.zdziarski.com/projects/mod_evasive/

click read more for my HowTo

Download the actual version of mod_evasive

# wget http://www.zdziarski.com/projects/mod_evasive/mod_evasive_1.10.1.tar.gz

Unpack it

# tar xvzf mod_evasive_1.10.1.tar.gz /usr/local/src/mod_evasive

Move to that directory

# cd /usr/local/src/mod_evasive

And edit the file mod_evasive20.c, we will have to change the line 45 to

#define MAILER "/bin/mail -t %s"

We compile the module:

Apache2	Apache2-Prefork
# /usr/sbin/apxs2 -cia mod_evasive20.c	# /usr/sbin/apxs2-prefork -cia mod_evasive20.c

Now we have to create a config file for mod_evasive:

# touch /etc/apache2/conf.d/mod_evasive.conf

and edit it

# vi /etc/apache2/conf.d/mod_evasive.conf

content of file

Apache2	Apache2-Prefork
LoadModule evasive20_module /usr/lib/apache2/mod_evasive20.so <IfModule mod_evasive20.c> DOSHashTableSize 3097 DOSPageCount 5 DOSSiteCount 100 DOSPageInterval 2 DOSSiteInterval 2 DOSBlockingPeriod 600 DOSEmailNotify This e-mail address is being protected from spambots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it </IfModule>	LoadModule evasive20_module /usr/lib/apache2-prefork/mod_evasive20.so <IfModule mod_evasive20.c> DOSHashTableSize 3097 DOSPageCount 5 DOSSiteCount 100 DOSPageInterval 2 DOSSiteInterval 2 DOSBlockingPeriod 600 DOSEmailNotify This e-mail address is being protected from spambots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it </IfModule>