Amazon GameLift Servers Protects Players at All Times with New DDoS Protection Feature

Multiplayer games are a major target of DDoS attacks. Existing TCP-based mitigation techniques fail to properly protect game traffic based on the UDP protocol, which requires low latency and high-frequency communication, and reactive approaches that respond after detecting an attack create a gap in the form of service interruption.

The newly launched Amazon GameLift Servers DDoS Protection adopts a proactive approach that starts filtering from the very first packet without waiting to detect an attack. This feature is provided to Amazon GameLift Servers customers at no additional cost.

This feature provides the following multi-layered defense system through a relay-based network called Player Gateway.

• Game server IP concealment: Since players only connect to the relay endpoint, the server IP is not exposed externally.
• Traffic verification: Only traffic from players authenticated via a Player Gateway token reaches the server.
• Per-player rate limiting: Traffic limits on individual connections prevent server overload caused by a single connection.
• Dynamic endpoint replacement: If a relay endpoint experiences issues, it is automatically replaced with a new endpoint.