Game servers can't afford the latency tax of traditional firewalls or cloud scrubbing. Neurowall's eBPF/XDP data plane filters DDoS and abuse traffic at the network driver — under a microsecond per packet — before it ever touches your game loop.
Competitive multiplayer runs on a tick loop measured in milliseconds. Any packet-processing overhead added by security infrastructure competes directly with the latency budget players actually feel.
Game servers run almost entirely over UDP for latency reasons — the same protocol choice that makes them a prime target for volumetric UDP floods and reflection/amplification attacks.
A firewall that adds even a few hundred microseconds per packet is a competitive disadvantage in FPS and fighting games where round-trip time is a visible, felt metric.
Routing traffic through a cloud-based scrubbing center adds round-trip distance and jitter for every player, all the time — not just during an attack.
Public game servers and matchmaking infrastructure are routinely targeted by cheap, widely available DDoS-for-hire ("booter") services — low-cost attacks a game studio has to defend against constantly, not just occasionally.
Unlike many SaaS products, gaming has near-zero tolerance for downtime during peak hours — players simply move to a competing title mid-session.
Mobile titles, FPS games, and MMOs each have distinct packet-size and rate profiles — a one-size-fits-all filtering configuration under- or over-protects depending on the game type.
Neurowall runs its data plane as an eBPF program attached via XDP (eXpress Data Path) — the earliest hook available in the Linux networking stack. Verdicts are made before a packet is copied into an sk_buff, before netfilter runs, before userspace ever sees it.
Choose the filtering profile that matches your game's traffic pattern — from a lightweight prefilter-only mode for mobile titles to full rules+DDoS protection for competitive matchmaking infrastructure. See Pipeline Profiles for how each one works.
Token-bucket rate limiting per source IP stops UDP floods and booter traffic at line rate, without touching legitimate player packets.
Filtering runs on the same box (or same datacenter) as your game server — no redirect through a third-party scrubbing center adding round-trip distance for every player.
Known booter/stresser infrastructure and abusive source ranges can be blocked automatically via threat intelligence feeds, before an attack even ramps up.
Generic firewall benchmarks use packet sizes (64/256/1500 bytes) chosen for network-equipment testing conventions, not gaming traffic. We benchmark at the sizes game servers actually generate.
| Packet Size | Typical Traffic |
|---|---|
| 128 bytes | Mobile games (iOS/Android) — lightweight player input packets |
| 256 bytes | FPS games (CS2, Valorant, Call of Duty) — most common profile, our primary benchmark target |
| 512 bytes | MMO/MOBA titles (WoW, FFXIV, League of Legends) — larger world/state update payloads |
Most studios and hosting providers reach for one of three approaches before finding a kernel-level solution. Each solves part of the problem and leaves a gap.
| Approach | What it does well | Where it falls short for games |
|---|---|---|
| Cloud-based DDoS scrubbing | Absorbs very large volumetric attacks off-network | Every packet — attack or not — is routed through a third-party datacenter first, permanently adding round-trip distance and jitter that players feel on every shot, every session, not just during an attack |
| iptables / conntrack on the game box | Free, built into every Linux kernel, fine at low packet rates | Each packet traverses the full netfilter hook chain in the kernel — under real flood volume this becomes the bottleneck itself, and connection-tracking tables can be exhausted by the flood before it's ever rate-limited |
| Userspace anti-DDoS agents | Flexible, easy to customize detection logic | Packets must cross the kernel/userspace boundary before a verdict is made — a copy and a context switch per packet, which is exactly the overhead a sub-millisecond tick loop can't absorb at scale |
| Doing nothing / relying on the hosting provider's basic protection | Zero setup cost | Generic hosting-level DDoS protection is tuned for web traffic, not UDP-heavy, latency-sensitive game traffic — it often blocks or rate-limits legitimate players and misses game-specific attack shapes entirely |
Unprotected or under-protected game infrastructure doesn't usually fail gracefully — it fails during your busiest hour, in front of your most engaged players.
Neurowall isn't a repurposed web-application firewall with a gaming label attached — its data-plane design decisions were made with sub-millisecond workloads in mind from the start.
Filtering runs on your own infrastructure, in the same datacenter as your game server — not redirected through a third party. There's no "protection tax" paid on every packet, every match, all day.
Because XDP runs at the network driver, attack packets are dropped before an sk_buff is even allocated — the flood never reaches netfilter, never reaches userspace, and never competes with legitimate traffic for kernel resources.
Every profile on this page is measured with the kernel's own BPF_PROG_TEST_RUN facility at real game-server packet sizes — see the full benchmark data, not a marketing round number.
Mobile, FPS, and MMO/MOBA traffic profiles are genuinely different — a single fixed configuration either under-protects or wastes CPU headroom. Neurowall's profile system lets you match protection level to your actual traffic, instead of choosing one-size-fits-none.
Talk to our team about your game server topology, traffic profile, and latency requirements.