An SDN-based Approach For Defending Against Reflective DDoS Attacks

• Published in: 2018 IEEE 43rd Conference on Local Computer Networks (LCN) pp. 299 - 302
• Main Authors: Lukaseder, Thomas, StOlzle, Kevin, Kleber, Stephan, Erb, Benjamin, Kargl, Frank
• Format: Conference Proceeding
• Language: English
• Published: IEEE 01.10.2018
• Subjects: Computer crime; Data collection; DDoS mitigation; IP networks; Monitoring; network-based mitigation; Protocols; reflective DDoS attacks; Servers; software-defined networking; Task analysis
• DOI: 10.1109/LCN.2018.8638036

Distributed Reflective Denial of Service (DRDoS) attacks are an immanent threat to Internet services. The potential scale of such attacks became apparent in March 2018 when a memcached-based attack peaked at 1.7 Tbps. Novel services built upon UDP increase the need for automated mitigation mechanisms that react to attacks without prior knowledge of the actual application protocols used. With the flexibility that software-defined networks offer, we developed a new approach for defending against DRDoS attacks; it not only protects against arbitrary DRDoS attacks but is also transparent for the attack target and can be used without assistance of the target host operator. The approach provides a robust mitigation system which is protocol-agnostic and effective in the defense against DRDoS attacks.