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Stop R-U-Dead-Yet? (R.U.D.Y.) attacks

R-U-Dead-Yet (R.U.D.Y.) attacks accomplish denial of service (DoS) by submitting long form fields. Use custom rules to stop these attacks by blocking requests that do not have a legitimate session cookie.

This example combines three expressions to target HTTP POST requests that do not contain a legitimate authenticated session cookie:

  • The first expression uses the http.request.uri.path field to target the paths to secure from R.U.D.Y.:

    http.request.uri.path matches "(comment|conversation|event|poll)/create"

  • The second uses a regular expression to match the format of a legitimate auth_session cookie. The not operator targets requests where that cookie is not formatted correctly:

    not http.cookie matches "auth_session=[0-9a-zA-Z]{32}-[0-9]{10}-[0-9a-z]{6}"

  • The third expression targets HTTP POST requests:

    http.request.method eq "POST"

The three expressions are combined into a compound expression using the and operator. When an HTTP POST request to any of the specified URIs does not contain a properly formatted auth_session cookie, Cloudflare blocks the request:

  • Expression: (http.request.method eq "POST" and http.request.uri.path matches "(comment|conversation|event|poll)/create" and not http.cookie matches "auth_session=[0-9a-zA-Z]{32}-[0-9]{10}-[0-9a-z]{6}")
  • Action: Block