Slowloris is basically an HTTP Denial of Service attack that affects threaded servers. It works like this:
- We start making lots of HTTP requests.
- We send headers periodically (every ~15 seconds) to keep the connections open.
- We never close the connection unless the server does so. If the server closes a connection, we create a new one keep doing the same thing.
This exhausts the servers thread pool and the server can't reply to other people.
If you found this work useful, please cite it as
@article{gkbrkslowloris,
title = "Slowloris",
author = "Gokberk Yaltirakli",
journal = "github.com",
year = "2015",
url = "https://github.com/gkbrk/slowloris"
}
You can clone the git repo or install using pip. Here's how you run it.
sudo pip3 install slowloris
slowloris example.com
That's all it takes to install and run slowloris.py.
If you want to clone using git instead of pip, here's how you do it.
git clone https://github.com/gkbrk/slowloris.git
cd slowloris
python3 slowloris.py example.com
However, if you plan on using the -x
option in order to use a SOCKS5 proxy for connecting instead of a direct connection over your IP address, you will need to install the PySocks
library (or any other implementation of the socks
library) as well. PySocks
is a fork from SocksiPy
by GitHub user @Anorov and can easily be installed by adding PySocks
to the pip
command above or running it again like so:
sudo pip3 install PySocks
You can then use the -x
option to activate SOCKS5 support and the --proxy-host
and --proxy-port
option to specify the SOCKS5 proxy host and its port, if they are different from the standard 127.0.0.1:8080
.
It is possible to modify the behaviour of slowloris with command-line
arguments. In order to get an up-to-date help document, just run
slowloris -h
.
- -p, --port
-
- Port of webserver, usually 80
- -s, --sockets
-
- Number of sockets to use in the test
- -v, --verbose
-
- Increases logging (output on terminal)
- -ua, --randuseragents
-
- Randomizes user-agents with each request
- -x, --useproxy
-
- Use a SOCKS5 proxy for connecting
- --https
-
- Use HTTPS for the requests
- --sleeptime
-
- Time to sleep between each header sent
The code is licensed under the MIT License.