HOWTO : SlowHTTPTest on Ubuntu Desktop 12.04 LTS

SlowHTTPTest is a highly configurable tool that simulates some Application Layer Denial of Service attacks. It works on majority of Linux platforms, OSX and Cygwin - a Unix-like environment and command-line interface for Microsoft Windows.

It implements most common low-bandwidth Application Layer DoS attacks, such as slowloris, Slow HTTP POST, Slow Read attack (based on TCP persist timer exploit) by draining concurrent connections pool, as well as Apache Range Header attack by causing very significant memory and CPU usage on the server.

Slowloris and Slow HTTP POST DoS attacks rely on the fact that the HTTP protocol, by design, requires requests to be completely received by the server before they are processed. If an HTTP request is not complete, or if the transfer rate is very low, the server keeps its resources busy waiting for the rest of the data. If the server keeps too many resources busy, this creates a denial of service. This tool is sending partial HTTP requests, trying to get denial of service from target HTTP server.

Slow Read DoS attack aims the same resources as slowloris and slow POST, but instead of prolonging the request, it sends legitimate HTTP request and reads the response slowly.

Step 1 :

sudo -sH
cd /opt

apt-get install subversion

svn checkout http://slowhttptest.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/ slowhttptest

cd /opt/slowhttptest
./configure
make
make install

Step 2 :

You can run it at any directory.

slowhttptest -h

Step 3 :

To uninstall it.

cd /opt/slowhttptest
sudo make uninstall

That's all! See you.