Re: Tactics for surviving heavy DDoS attack?

I missed some messages in this thread, but I don't think Tor has been 
mentioned as an option to help with DDoS.

Excerpting from the Tor Abuse FAQ:
<http://www.torproject.org/faq-abuse.html.en>

----snip----
What about distributed denial of service attacks?

Distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks typically rely on having a 
group of thousands of computers all sending floods of traffic to a 
victim. Since the goal is to overpower the bandwidth of the victim, they 
typically send UDP packets since those don't require handshakes or 
coordination. But because Tor only transports correctly formed TCP 
streams, not all IP packets, you cannot send UDP packets over Tor. (You 
can't do specialized forms of this attack like SYN flooding either.) So 
ordinary DDoS attacks are not possible over Tor. Tor also doesn't allow 
bandwidth amplification attacks against external sites: you need to send 
in a byte for every byte that the Tor network will send to your 
destination. So in general, attackers who control enough bandwidth to 
launch an effective DDoS attack can do it just fine without Tor.
----snip----

There are issues. Some infrastructure (authority directories, exit node 
routers) have publicly visible IP addresses. Not all apps will work over 
Tor (UDP, non-TCP). Tor's benefits cost additional technical/legal 
overhead for users and admins. Read the design papers (roadmaps, 
challenges) for more on those.