DDoS mitigation in non-cooperative environments

Abstract

Distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks have plagued the Internet for many years. We propose a system to defend against DDoS attacks in a non-cooperative environment, where upstream intermediate networks need to be given an economic incentive in order for them to cooperate in the attack mitigation. Lack of such incentives is a root cause for the rare deployment of distributed DDoS mitigation schemes. Our system is based on game-theoretic principles that provably provide incentives to each participating AS (Autonomous Systems) to report its true defense costs to the victim, which computes and compensates the most cost-efficient (yet still effective) set of defenders ASs. We also present simulation results with real AS-level topologies to demonstrate the economic feasibility of our approach. © 2008 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.