Oblivious DDoS Mitigation with Locator/ID Separation Protocol

The need to keep an attacker oblivious of an attack mitigation effort is a very important component of a defense against denial of services (DoS) and distributed denial of services (DDoS) attacks because it helps to dissuade attackers from changing their attack patterns. Conceptually, DDoS mitigation can be achieved by two components. The first is a decoy server that provides a service function or receives attack traffic as a substitute for a legitimate server. The second is a decoy network that restricts attack traffic to the peripheries of a network, or which reroutes attack traffic to decoy servers. In this paper, we propose the use of a two-stage map table extension Locator/ID Separation Protocol (LISP) to realize a decoy network. We also describe and demonstrate how LISP can be used to implement an oblivious DDoS mitigation mechanism by adding a simple extension on the LISP MapServer. Together with decoy servers, this method can terminate DDoS traffic on the ingress end of an LISP-enabled network. We verified the effectiveness of our proposed mechanism through simulated DDoS attacks on a simple network topology. Our evaluation results indicate that the mechanism could be activated within a few seconds, and that the attack traffic can be terminated without incurring overhead on the MapServer.