Optimal Filtering for DDoS Attacks

Abstract

Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attacks are a major problem in the Internet today. In one form of a DDoS attack, a large number of compromised hosts send unwanted traffic to the victim, thus exhausting the resources of the victim and preventing it from serving its legitimate clients. One of the main mechanisms that have been proposed to deal with DDoS is filtering, which allows routers to selectively block unwanted traffic. Given the magnitude of DDoS attacks and the high cost of filters in the routers today, the successful mitigation of a DDoS attack using filtering crucially depends on the efficient allocation of filtering resources. In this paper, we consider a single router, typically the gateway of the victim, with a limited number of available filters. We study how to optimally allocate filters to attack sources, or entire domains of attack sources, so as to maximize the amount of good traffic preserved, under a constraint on the number of filters. We formulate the problem as an optimization problem and solve it optimally using dynamic programming, study the properties of the optimal allocation, experiment with a simple heuristic and evaluate our solutions for a range of realistic attack-scenarios. First, we look at a single-tier where the collateral damage is high due to the filtering at the granularity of domains. Second, we look at the two-tier problem where we have an additional constraint on the number of filters and the filtering is performed on the granularity of attackers and domains.