Python DoS Prevention: The Billion Laughs Attack

What is a “Billion Laughs” attack and how can you protect your python applications?

What is DoS?

Before we dig into the “Billion Laughs” attack or how to go about protecting your applications, let me give a quick overview of what DoS is. DoS stands for denial-of-service and makes up a general class of attacks designed to restrict the Availability of an application, service, or company. DoS attacks are fascinating in part because of the huge amount of variability in how they’re executed. I won’t go into much detail here, but here’s are some historic DoS attacks:

Hackers Take Down the Most Wired Country in Europe

A 1.3-Tbs DDoS Hit GitHub, the Largest Yet Recorded