Defending at Wire Speed: Building DDoS-Resilient Services with XDP and nftables

As DDoS attacks escalate in scale and sophistication, conventional firewall rules prove insufficient for protecting public-facing infrastructure. This article presents a production-proven, multi-layered defense architecture leveraging Linux-native technologies—XDP for sub-kernel packet filtering and nftables for dynamic rate limiting—to neutralize threats at wire speed. By operating across multiple defensive layers from NIC to kernel to upstream providers, this approach enables infrastructure operators to achieve both high throughput and resilience against volumetric attacks.