Anubis check stuck?
Sourceware's Anubis proof-of-work system is facing persistent scraper attacks, leading to rate limiting and slow performance.
Mark Wielaard discusses ongoing scraper attacks targeting Sourceware, causing rate limiting and impacting services like gitweb and Anubis. A proposed solution involves an IP allow-list for authenticated users, with ongoing efforts to add support for more services and manual IP authentication.
- proposer
Explains that Anubis and other services are under heavy scraper attack, making rate limiting challenging.
“We should add authentication through patchwork and wiki. And add some way to manually authenticate an ip address. If nothing works please email admin-requests@ to get yours added.”
- other
Reports experiencing 429 errors when trying to access cgit, indicating the rate limiting is affecting users.
“I've been unable to access any cgit links for at least a week, I get the 429 error every single time.”
Technical Tradeoffs
- Implementing IP allow-listing may inconvenience users with dynamic IP addresses or those behind CGNAT.
- Balancing security against user accessibility is a constant challenge with bot mitigation strategies.
In Details
Sourceware's infrastructure, including gitweb and Anubis (a proof-of-work system for access control), is experiencing denial-of-service attacks from scrapers. The current rate-limiting mechanisms are struggling to differentiate legitimate user traffic from malicious bot activity, prompting discussions on enhanced IP authentication strategies.
- Anubis
- A proof-of-work system used by Sourceware to mitigate automated access and bot traffic. Users must solve a computational challenge to gain access.
- gitweb
- A web-based interface for browsing Git repositories, commonly used by open-source projects for code repository access.
- cgit
- An alternative web-based interface for Git repositories, often considered more efficient than gitweb.
- 429 error
- An HTTP status code indicating 'Too Many Requests,' used for rate limiting to prevent abuse.
- Nginx
- A popular web server and reverse proxy that can be configured with rate-limiting modules.