Publication Data
Distributed divide-and-conquer techniques for effective DDoS attack defenses
Abstract: Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attacks have emerged as
a popular means of causing mass targeted service disruptions, often for extended
periods of time. The relative ease and low costs of launching such attacks,
supplemented by the current woeful state of any viable defense mechanism, have made
them one of the top threats to the Internet community today. While distributed packet
logging and/or packet marking have been explored in the past for DDoS attack
traceback/mitigation, we propose to advance the state of the art by using a novel
distributed divide-and-conquer approach in designing a new data dissemination
architecture that efficiently tracks attack sources. The main focus of our work is to
tackle the three disjoint aspects of the problem, namely attack tree construction,
attack path frequency detection, and packet to path association, independently and to
use succinct recurrence relations to express their individual implementations. We also
evaluate the network traffic and storage overhead induced by our proposed deployment on
real-life Internet topologies, supporting hundreds of victims each subject to thousands
of high-bandwidth flows simultaneously, and conclude that we can truly achieve single
packet traceback guarantees with minimal overhead and high efficiency.
