A DoS protection group provides a simple policy that can be applied to interfaces. This policy can specify a complete set of parameters to tune the behavior of the DoS protection groups. The system uses these parameters to determine the priority and rates for various control protocols. The rate of traffic for a particular protocol is unlikely to be the same on all ports in the system. A configuration can have several types of interfaces, such as DHCP access clients, PPPoE access clients, and uplink interfaces. Each of these interfaces requires a different DoS configuration. All interfaces are associated with a default DoS protection group, which has standard system defaults. The maximum rates are per line module, and the drop probability is 100 percent (all suspicious packets are dropped).