AWS Shield: Managed DDoS Protection for Your Applications

DDoS attacks are one of the most common threats in the digital world, and they can shut down services, cause downtime, and affect the user experience. AWS Shield is a managed DDoS protection service designed to protect your web applications running on AWS. Through automatic protection against common and sophisticated DDoS attacks, AWS Shield ensures that your applications are secure and highly available.

In this blog, we’ll explore the features, benefits, and use cases of AWS Shield, and how it integrates seamlessly with other AWS services to provide robust security.

AWS Shield is a managed service that protects your AWS infrastructure from DDoS attacks. It provides two levels of protection:

• AWS Shield Standard: Automatically available to all AWS customers at no additional cost, offering protection against the most common DDoS attacks.
• AWS Shield Advanced: The premium service is advanced protection with cost mitigation, including access to DDoS response experts.

Key Takeaways:

• Automatic Protection: Shield Standard is automatically enabled for all AWS services.
• Enhanced Protection: Shield Advanced offers multiple layers of protection with proactive responses.
• Global Coverage: Protects AWS resources like Elastic Load Balancing, Amazon CloudFront, Amazon Route 53, and many more.

AWS Shield uses sophisticated techniques and infrastructure in real time to identify and mitigate DDoS attacks.

1. Detection and Analysis

AWS Shield continuously monitors traffic looking for patterns that resemble DDoS attacks. It uses:

• Traffic Anomaly Detection: Detects sudden spikes or anomalies in traffic.
• Signature Matching: Compares the traffic pattern against known DDoS attack signatures.

2. Mitigation

Once an attack is detected, AWS Shield automatically applies mitigation techniques such as:

• Rate Limiting: The number of requests from suspicious IPs gets restricted.
• Traffic Filtering: It eliminates malicious traffic, but legitimate traffic is allowed.
• Automatic Scaling: The elastic infrastructure from AWS is leveraged to absorb large-scale DDoS attacks.

3. Integration with AWS Services

AWS Shield integrates services such as the following:

• Amazon CloudFront: The incoming traffic gets dispersed across edge locations, and that reduces the effects of DDoS attacks.
• Elastic Load Balancing (ELB): Incoming traffic is distributed to various resources for enhancement in fault tolerance.
• AWS WAF: Allows custom rules to block specific IPs or traffic patterns.

1. AWS Shield Standard

• Automatic DDoS Protection: Included at no cost with AWS services like CloudFront, Route 53, and ELB.
• Network Layer Protection: Guards against attacks targeting layers 3 and 4 of the OSI model, such as SYN floods and UDP reflection attacks.

2. AWS Shield Advanced

• Enhanced DDoS Protection: Guards against more sophisticated attacks targeting application layers.
• Cost Protection: It covers the charges incurred through scaling during DDoS attacks.
• DRT: Provides 24/7 access to AWS security experts in the mitigation of attacks.
• Real-Time Metrics: Offers detailed metrics using Amazon CloudWatch.

3. Global Threat Environment Dashboard

AWS Shield Advanced provides a dashboard that includes:

• Insights about the live attacks and threats under play.
• For better threat analysis, it offers historical data as well.

4. Proactive Engagement

Shield Advanced comprises proactive engagement from AWS experts who help in crafting preemptive security measures.

AWS Shield can address a wide range of DDoS scenarios across various workloads:

1. Protecting Web Applications

Shield ensures web applications hosted on AWS remain accessible by mitigating common DDoS attacks like HTTP floods and SYN floods.

2. Safeguarding APIs

APIs exposed via Amazon API Gateway or Application Load Balancer are protected from large-scale, bot-driven attacks.

3. Defending Against Volumetric Attacks

Shield absorbs massive spikes in traffic caused by volumetric attacks, ensuring legitimate traffic is not affected.

4. Mitigating Application Layer Attacks

Shield Advanced works along with AWS WAF to block sophisticated attacks targeting the application layer.

Imagine an e-commerce platform that experiences a DDoS attack during a flash sale. AWS Shield ensures uninterrupted service through the following:

1. Traffic Monitoring: Shield detects anomalous traffic patterns and identifies the attack.
2. Automatic Mitigation: The attack traffic is filtered out without affecting legitimate users.
3. Cost Protection: Shield Advanced covers additional scaling costs incurred during the attack.
4. Expert Assistance: The AWS DDoS Response Team guides to mitigate the attack effectively.

This proactive and layered approach ensures the e-commerce platform remains operational and responsive during critical events.

AWS Shield is one of the critical tools for an organization that demands high DDoS protection. Here's why it's important to have it in your AWS environment.

Key Benefits:

• All-Round Protection: It helps prevent common and complex DDoS attacks.
• User-Friendly: Shield Standard is on by default with no extra configurations needed.
• Economical: Shield Advanced comes with cost protection and expert help.
• Geo-Location: Defends resources everywhere across AWS Regions and edge locations.
• Proactive Security: In real-time monitors and mitigates threats.

Applications would be accessible and running under normal performance even with large DDoS attacks by using AWS Shield.