Google Project Shield Promises DDoS Attack Prevention

Project Shield service is designed to keep static websites for human rights, election and news groups online, but it might presage a commercial Google DDoS defense service.

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Can Googles new Project Shield save the world from packet storms, zombie PCs, low-orbit ion cannons or Armageddon attacks?
Not yet. But Googles latest endeavor, sounding a bit like a
Marvel Comics creation
, can provide distributed denial of service (DDoS) protection for static Web pages.
Project Shield is an initiative to expand Googles own distributed denial of service (DDoS) mitigation capabilities to protect free expression online, says
Googles related service page
. The service currently combines Googles DDoS mitigation technologies and Page Speed Service to allow websites to serve their content through Googles own infrastructure for DDoS mitigation.
The effort is currently invitation only, although Google is soliciting trusted testers to help it get the service up and running, provided they hail from the domains of news, human rights or elections-related content.
[ Find out how to gird your DNS against distributed denial of service attacks. Read
Is Your DNS Server A Weapon?
]
The DDoS attack defense is offered via
Page Speed Service
, which according to a related FAQ is an online service to automatically speed up loading of your web pages. According to Google, the service fetches content from your servers, rewrites your pages by applying Web performance best practices and serves them to end users via Googles servers across the globe.
This level of global distribution also provides protection against some types of DDoS attacks, although the company cautioned that its not foolproof. Google has designed its infrastructure to defend itself from quite large attacks and this initiative is aimed at providing a similar level of protection to third-party websites, it said.
Google said that Page Speed Service and Project Shield are currently free, but if that changes it will give users at least 30 days notice. If it does begin to charge, Google hopes to offer discounted or free subscriptions for charities and non-profits.
Speaking by phone, Shuman Ghosemajumder, VP of strategy for automated attack defense firm Shape Security and formerly the head of Googles efforts to combat
click fraud
, lauded the new service. Project Shield is a great initiative that I think is going to really make a difference for free speech online, he said. When youre looking at websites that provide that type of information, its typically static website content, and thats what Project Shield is designed for.
But if youre a bank, trading website or social network -- anything that requires database-driven, real-time dynamic interaction -- thats not what Project Shield is designed for, Ghosemajumder said, noting that he wasnt involved in the development of Googles DDoS defenses.
In fact, attacks against database-driven websites are much more difficult to defend against, as the
Operation Ababil DDoS attacks against U.S. banks
proved, before the months-long attack campaign appeared to go on hiatus. Thats because attackers can bring a variety of database-choking techniques to bear, ranging from packet-spewing
SYN floods
and encrypted traffic attacks from
botnet-infected zombie PCs
to crowd-sourced JavaScript attack tools such as
low-orbit ion cannons
and potentially even overwhelming
Armageddon attacks
that take down upstream service providers, too.
Of course, theres nothing to stop Google from one day ramping up its service to the point where it can defend database-driven sites, and compete with current DDoS defense service providers. In fact, Matthew Prince, CEO of DDoS attack mitigation firm CloudFlare, has been predicting that will happen, and that Google might gobble up rivals in the process.
The challenges that websites face in both performance and security are substantial so its inevitable there will be a consolidation of the edge of the network, Prince
told the
Register
. In the future, there will likely be two to six companies that run the edge of the Web. Weve been predicting for some time those companies will be Akamai, Amazon, CloudFlare, and Google.

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Google Project Shield Promises DDoS Attack Prevention