United We Stand: Collaborative Detection and Mitigation of Amplification DDoS Attacks at Scale
Daniel Wägner, Daniel Kopp, Matthias Wichtlhuber, Christoph Dietzel, Oliver Hohlfeld, Georgios Smaragdakis, Anja Feldmann
Abstract
Amplification Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks' traffic and harm are at an all-time high. To defend against such attacks, distributed attack mitigation platforms, such as traffic scrubbing centers that operate in peering locations, e.g., Internet Exchange Points (IXP), have been deployed in the Internet over the years. These attack mitigation platforms apply sophisticated techniques to detect attacks and drop attack traffic locally, thus, act as sensors of attacks. However, it has not yet been systematically evaluated and reported to what extent coordination of these views by different platforms can lead to more effective mitigation of amplification DDoS attacks. In this paper, we ask the question: "Is it possible to mitigate more amplification attacks and drop more attack traffic when distributed attack mitigation platforms collaborate?"