DDoS defense by offense
Abstract
This article presents the design, implementation, analysis, and experimental evaluation of speak-up , a defense against application-level distributed denial-of-service (DDoS), in which attackers cripple a server by sending legitimate-looking requests that consume computational resources (e.g., CPU cycles, disk). With speak-up, a victimized server encourages all clients, resources permitting, to automatically send higher volumes of traffic . We suppose that attackers are already using most of their upload bandwidth so cannot react to the encouragement. Good clients, however, have spare upload bandwidth so can react to the encouragement with drastically higher volumes of traffic. The intended outcome of this traffic inflation is that the good clients crowd out the bad ones, thereby capturing a much larger fraction of the server's resources than before. We experiment under various conditions and find that speak-up causes the server to spend resources on a group of clients in rough proportion to their aggregate upload bandwidths, which is the intended result.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Pub Defense Publication
- Publication Date
- Mar 01, 2010
- Source ID
- 10.1145/1731060.1731063
Entities
People
- David Karger
- Hari Balakrishnan
- Michael Walfish
- Mythili Vutukuru
- Scott Shenker
Organizations
- Division of Computer and Network Systems
- Massachusetts Institute of Technology
- Office of Naval Research
- University of California, Berkeley
- University of Texas at Austin