Biblio

Cities are becoming increasingly smart as the Internet of Things (IoT) proliferates. With IoT devices interconnected, smart cities can offer novel and ubiquitous services as well as automate many of our daily lives (e.g., smart health, smart home). The abundance in the number of IoT devices leads to divergent types of security threats as well. One of such important attacks is the Distributed Denial of Service attack(DDoS). DDoS attacks have become increasingly common in the internet of things because of the rapid growth of insecure devices. These attacks slow down legitimate network requests. Although DDoS attacks were first reported in 1996, the sophistication of these attacks has increased significantly. In mid-August 2020, a 2 Terabytes per second(TBps) attack targeting critical infrastructure, such as finance, was reported. In the next two years, it is predicted that this number will double to 15 million attacks. Blockchain technology, whose development dates back to the advent of the internet, has become one of the most important advancements to come along since that time. Several applications can use this technology to secure exchanges. Using blockchain to mitigate DDoS attacks is discussed in this survey paper in diverse domains to date. Its purpose is to expose the strengths, weaknesses, and limitations of the different approaches to DDoS mitigation. As a research and development platform for DDoS mitigation, this paper will act as a central hub for a more comprehensive understanding of these approaches.

Network security is a prominent topic that is gaining international attention. Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack is often regarded as one of the most serious threats to network security. Software Defined Network (SDN) decouples the control plane from the data plane, which can meet various network requirements. But SDN can also become the object of DDoS attacks. This paper proposes an automated DDoS attack mitigation method that is based on the programmability of the Ryu controller and the features of the OpenFlow switch flow tables. The Mininet platform is used to simulate the whole process, from SDN traffic generation to using a K-Nearest Neighbor model for traffic classification, as well as identifying and mitigating DDoS attack. The packet counts of the victim's malicious traffic input port are significantly lower after the mitigation method is implemented than before the mitigation operation. The purpose of mitigating DDoS attack is successfully achieved.

Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks are widely used by malicious actors to disrupt network infrastructures/services. A common attack is TCP SYN Flood that attempts to exhaust memory and processing resources. Typical mitigation mechanisms, i.e. SYN cookies require significant processing resources and generate large rates of backscatter traffic to block them. In this paper, we propose a detection and mitigation schema that focuses on generating and optimizing signature-based rules. To that end, network traffic is monitored and appropriate packet-level data are processed to form signatures i.e. unique combinations of packet field values. These are fed to machine learning models that classify them to malicious/benign. Malicious signatures corresponding to specific destinations identify potential victims. TCP traffic to victims is redirected to high-performance programmable XDPenabled firewalls that filter off ending traffic according to signatures classified as malicious. To enhance mitigation performance malicious signatures are subjected to a reduction process, formulated as a multi-objective optimization problem. Minimization objectives are (i) the number of malicious signatures and (ii) collateral damage on benign traffic. We evaluate our approach in terms of detection accuracy and packet filtering performance employing traces from production environments and high rate generated attack traffic. We showcase that our approach achieves high detection accuracy, significantly reduces the number of filtering rules and outperforms the SYN cookies mechanism in high-speed traffic scenarios.

TCP SYN Flood is one of the most widespread DoS attack types performed on computer networks nowadays. As a possible countermeasure, we implemented and deployed modified versions of three network-based mitigation techniques for TCP SYN authentication. All of them utilize the TCP three-way handshake mechanism to establish a security association with a client before forwarding its SYN data. These algorithms are especially effective against regular attacks with spoofed IP addresses. However, our modifications allow deflecting even more sophisticated SYN floods able to bypass most of the conventional approaches. This comes at the cost of the delayed first connection attempt, but all subsequent SYN segments experience no significant additional latency (\textbackslashtextless; 0.2ms). This paper provides a detailed description and analysis of the approaches, as well as implementation details with enhanced security tweaks. The discussed implementations are built on top of the hardware-accelerated FPGA-based DDoS protection solution developed by CESNET and are about to be deployed in its backbone network and Internet exchange point at NIX.CZ.

With the emergence of computationally intensive and delay sensitive applications, mobile edge computing(MEC) has become more and more popular. Simultaneously, MEC paradigm is faced with security challenges, the most harmful of which is DDoS attack. In this paper, we focus on the resource orchestration algorithm in MEC scenario to mitigate DDoS attack. Most of existing works on resource orchestration algorithm barely take into account DDoS attack. Moreover, they assume that MEC nodes are unselfish, while in practice MEC nodes are selfish and try to maximize their individual utility only, as they usually belong to different network operators. To solve such problems, we propose a price-based resource orchestration algorithm(PROA) using game theory and convex optimization, which aims at mitigating DDoS attack while maximizing the utility of each participant. Pricing resources to simulate market mechanisms, which is national to make rational decisions for all participants. Finally, we conduct experiment using Matlab and show that the proposed PROA can effectively mitigate DDoS attack on the attacked MEC node.

Nowadays, cybersecurity threat is a big challenge to all organizations that present their services over the Internet. Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack is the most effective and used attack and seriously affects the quality of service of each E-organization. Hence, mitigation this type of attack is considered a persistent need. In this paper, we used Network Load Balancing (NLB) and High Availability Proxy (HAProxy) as mitigation techniques. The NLB is used in the Windows platform and HAProxy in the Linux platform. Moreover, Internet Information Service (IIS) 10.0 is implemented on Windows server 2016 and Apache 2 on Linux Ubuntu 16.04 as web servers. We evaluated each load balancer efficiency in mitigating synchronize (SYN) DDoS attack on each platform separately. The evaluation process is accomplished in a real network and average response time and average CPU are utilized as metrics. The results illustrated that the NLB in the Windows platform achieved better performance in mitigation SYN DDOS compared to HAProxy in the Linux platform. Whereas, the average response time of the Window webservers is reduced with NLB. However, the impact of the SYN DDoS on the average CPU usage of the IIS 10.0 webservers was more than those of the Apache 2 webservers.

A cooperative network defense is one approach to fend off large-scale Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attacks. In this regard, the Blockchain Signaling System (BloSS) is a multi-domain, blockchain-based, cooperative DDoS defense system, where each Autonomous System (AS) is taking part in the defense alliance. Each AS can exchange attack information about ongoing attacks via the Ethereum blockchain. However, the currently operational implementation of BloSS is not interactive or visualized, but the DDoS mitigation is automated. In realworld defense systems, a human cybersecurity analyst decides whether a DDoS threat should be mitigated or not. Thus, this work presents the design of a security management dashboard for BloSS, designed for interactive use by cyber security analysts.

The Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) is a term applied to the industrial application of M2M devices. The security of IIoT devices is a difficult problem and where the automation of critical infrastructure is intended, risks may be unacceptable. Remote attacks are a significant threat and solutions are sought which are secure by default. The problem space may be analyzed using threat modelling methods. Software Defined Networks (SDN) provide mitigation for remote attacks which exploit local area networks. Similar concepts applied to the WAN may improve availability and performance and provide granular data on link characteristics. Schemes such as the Software Defined Perimeter allow IIoT devices to communicate on the Internet, mitigating avenues of remote attack. Finally, separation of duties at the IIoT device may prevent attacks on the integrity of the device or the confidentiality and integrity of its communications. Work remains to be done on the mitigation of DDoS.

Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks are intense and are targeted to major infrastructure, governments and military organizations in each country. There are a lot of mitigations about DDoS, and the concept of Content Delivery Network (CDN) has been able to avoid attacks on websites. However, since the existing CDN system is fundamentally centralized, it may be difficult to prevent DDoS. This paper describes the distributed CDN Schema using Private Blockchain which solves the problem of participation of existing transparent and unreliable nodes. This will explain DDoS mitigation that can be used by military and government agencies.

DDoS attacks are a significant threat to internet service or infrastructure providers. This poster presents an FPGA-accelerated device and DDoS mitigation technique to overcome such attacks. Our work addresses amplification attacks whose goal is to generate enough traffic to saturate the victims links. The main idea of the device is to efficiently filter malicious traffic at high-speeds directly in the backbone infrastructure before it even reaches the victim's network. We implemented our solution for two FPGA platforms using the high-level description in P4, and we report on its performance in terms of throughput and hardware resources.

Recently Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) are becoming more and more sophisticated, which makes the existing defence systems not capable of tolerating by themselves against wide-ranging attacks. Thus, collaborative protection mitigation has become a needed alternative to extend defence mechanisms. However, the existing coordinated DDoS mitigation approaches either they require a complex configuration or are highly-priced. Blockchain technology offers a solution that reduces the complexity of signalling DDoS system, as well as a platform where many autonomous systems (Ass) can share hardware resources and defence capabilities for an effective DDoS defence. In this work, we also used a Deep learning DDoS detection system; we identify individual DDoS attack class and also define whether the incoming traffic is legitimate or attack. By classifying the attack traffic flow separately, our proposed mitigation technique could deny only the specific traffic causing the attack, instead of blocking all the traffic coming towards the victim(s).

Network attacks, including Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS), continuously increase in terms of bandwidth along with damage (recent attacks exceed 1.7 Tbps) and have a devastating impact on the targeted companies/governments. Over the years, mitigation techniques, ranging from blackholing to policy-based filtering at routers, and on to traffic scrubbing, have been added to the network operator's toolbox. Even though these mitigation techniques provide some protection, they either yield severe collateral damage, e.g., dropping legitimate traffic (blackholing), are cost-intensive, or do not scale well for Tbps level attacks (ACL filtering, traffic scrubbing), or require cooperation and sharing of resources (Flowspec). In this paper, we propose Advanced Blackholing and its system realization Stellar. Advanced blackholing builds upon the scalability of blackholing while limiting collateral damage by increasing its granularity. Moreover, Stellar reduces the required level of cooperation to enhance mitigation effectiveness. We show that fine-grained blackholing can be realized, e.g., at a major IXP, by combining available hardware filters with novel signaling mechanisms. We evaluate the scalability and performance of Stellar at a large IXP that interconnects more than 800 networks, exchanges more than 6 Tbps traffic, and witnesses many network attacks every day. Our results show that network attacks, e.g., DDoS amplification attacks, can be successfully mitigated while the networks and services under attack continue to operate untroubled.

Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks remain one of the top threats to enterprise networks and ISPs nowadays. It can cause tremendous damage by bringing down online websites or services. Existing DDoS defense solutions either brings high cost such as upgrading existing firewall or IPS, or bring excessive traffic delay by using third-party cloud-based DDoS filtering services. In this work, we propose a DDoS defense framework that utilizes Network Function Virtualization (NFV) architecture to provide low cost and highly flexible solutions for enterprises. In particular, the system uses virtual network agents to perform attack traffic filtering before they are forwarded to the target server. Agents are created on demand to verify the authenticity of the source of packets, and drop spoofed packets in order protect the target server. Furthermore, we design a scalable and flexible dispatcher to forward packets to corresponding agents for processing. A bucket-based forwarding mechanism is used to improve the scalability of the dispatcher through batching forwarding. The dispatcher can also adapt to agent addition and removal. Our simulation results demonstrate that the dispatcher can effectively serve a large volume of traffic with low dropping rate. The system can successfully mitigate SYN flood attack by introducing minimal performance degradation to legitimate traffic.

The Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) has been used for decades as the de facto protocol to exchange reachability information among networks in the Internet. However, little is known about how this protocol is used to restrict reachability to selected destinations, e.g., that are under attack. While such a feature, BGP blackholing, has been available for some time, we lack a systematic study of its Internet-wide adoption, practices, and network efficacy, as well as the profile of blackholed destinations. In this paper, we develop and evaluate a methodology to automatically detect BGP blackholing activity in the wild. We apply our method to both public and private BGP datasets. We find that hundreds of networks, including large transit providers, as well as about 50 Internet exchange points (IXPs) offer blackholing service to their customers, peers, and members. Between 2014–2017, the number of blackholed prefixes increased by a factor of 6, peaking at 5K concurrently blackholed prefixes by up to 400 Autonomous Systems. We assess the effect of blackholing on the data plane using both targeted active measurements as well as passive datasets, finding that blackholing is indeed highly effective in dropping traffic before it reaches its destination, though it also discards legitimate traffic. We augment our findings with an analysis of the target IP addresses of blackholing. Our tools and insights are relevant for operators considering offering or using BGP blackholing services as well as for researchers studying DDoS mitigation in the Internet.

A Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack is an attempt to make an online service, a network, or even an entire organization, unavailable by saturating it with traffic from multiple sources. DDoS attacks are among the most common and most devastating threats that network defenders have to watch out for. DDoS attacks are becoming bigger, more frequent, and more sophisticated. Volumetric attacks are the most common types of DDoS attacks. A DDoS attack is considered volumetric, or high-rate, when within a short period of time it generates a large amount of packets or a high volume of traffic. High-rate attacks are well-known and have received much attention in the past decade; however, despite several detection and mitigation strategies have been designed and implemented, high-rate attacks are still halting the normal operation of information technology infrastructures across the Internet when the protection mechanisms are not able to cope with the aggregated capacity that the perpetrators have put together. With this in mind, the present paper aims to propose and test a distributed and collaborative architecture for online high-rate DDoS attack detection and mitigation based on an in-memory distributed graph data structure and unsupervised machine learning algorithms that leverage real-time streaming data and analytics. We have successfully tested our proposed mechanism using a real-world DDoS attack dataset at its original rate in pursuance of reproducing the conditions of an actual large scale attack.