DDoS-Resilient Scheduling to Counter Application Layer Attacks Under Imperfect Detection

Overview

Countering Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks is becoming ever more challenging with the vast resources and techniques increasingly available to attackers. This paper considers sophisticated attacks that are protocol-compliant, non-intrusive, and utilize legitimate application-layer requests to overwhelm system resources. The authors characterize application layer resource attacks as either request flooding, asymmetric, or repeated one-shot, on the basis of the application workload parameters that they exploit. To protect servers from these attacks, they propose a counter-mechanism that consists of suspicion assignment mechanism and a DDoS-resilient scheduler, DDoS Shield.