Patent ID: 7725708

Claim:
A method for automatic denial of service protection in a media gateway, the method comprising: (a) receiving packets at a network interface of a media gateway, the packets being addressed to a network address of the network interface; (b) forwarding the packets addressed to the network address of the network interface of the media gateway to a processor in the media gateway; (c) at the processor, determining whether any of the packets addressed to the network address of the network interface violate a rate-based policing policy of the media gateway; (d) adding source identifying information associated with the packets that are determined to violate the rate-based policing policy to an access control list in the media gateway; (e) preventing at least some packets matching criteria in the access control list from being forwarded to the processor in the media gateway; and (f) forwarding a sampling of the packets matching criteria in the access control list to the processor in the media gateway and determining whether to remove an entry from the access control list based on the sampled packets.