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Comment by paffdragon | Hacker News Reader

I am not a network engineer, but when I hear ICMP, I associate it with consuming CPU on my shitty router and DDos potential. I only block ICMP for unknown external traffic (response to packets not otherwise blocked by firewall, then aggressively rate limit that) and allow it internally. I used to go overboard in the past and learned how annoying it is to not being able to do a simple ping...

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If people can send packets to you, they can DDoS your shitty plastic router CPU regardless of you blocking ICMP or not. And whether your router generates a reply is really ancillary to the question — so long as that reply isn't notably larger than the triggering packet. (Otherwise you're running a reflection amplifier and some people would like to have words with you.)

These days with cheap bandwidth about, the only way to really prevent DDoS is to catch them at the source(s). Hell, I have 25Gbit at home (Init7), I can blow entire small telcos off the internet. Once. Then Init7 terminates my service. And that's really the only thing that can prevent this…

Fair enough. For me personally it's not that big of a concern. I just remember from a previous network monitoring gig that using ICMP had a few problems with rate limiting. But that wasn't my cheap router at stake. It's probably just something that stuck with me and not that relevant in my context anymore.

Block icmp don't even fix the cpu issue though, the router still use cpu to decide which packet should be blocked.

If you really care about the cpu usage, you should drop raw traffic instead (when dos from certain ip is detected)

Indeed. What I meant was that it's cheaper to drop than to generate a reply. But you are right, and I also mentioned in the other reply, that my router wouldn't stand a chance dropping or replying to a DDoS anyway, so probably this concern is not relevant in the home router context.

It's probably just a result of my incredibly slow home internet, but the CPU part was never an aspect for me. It's primarily related to the wasted bandwidth on the outbound side by sending a reply

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