Cooperative Signaling of DDoS Attacks based on Blockchains

The rapid growth in the number of insecure portable and stationary devices and the exponential increase of traffic volume makes Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attacks a top security threat to services provisioning. These attacks are one of the principal causes of concern for service providers is that not only the volume of traffic of DDoS attacks is growing, but also their complexity.

Existing defense mechanisms lack resources and flexibility to cope with attacks by themselves, and by utilizing other's companies resources, the burden of the mitigation can be shared. An alternative is sharing hardware and defense capabilities with other systems, an approach called cooperative DDoS mitigation.

Blockchains can be used in this context for signaling DDoS attacks information across multiple domains, simplifying existing "gossip-based" protocols. However, there are challenges inherent to the cooperative defense approach that requires being addressed, such as the presence of an incentive mechanism to ensure harmony between the cooperative entities. For instance, if one Internet Service Provider (ISP) is often a target of DDoS attacks, it needs to provide a reward to those who participate in the collaborative defense. Furthermore, Blockchain is already widely used as infrastructure for cryptocurrencies, which can be used to promote incentives in a cooperative defense.

In this thesis, is required the design and evaluation of such back-end appliance comprising an incentive mechanism to create harmony in a cooperative defense based on blockchains. This thesis extends existing work [1] which provides the baseline scenario of such an application.

Further references and information can be found on [1]. Also, feel free to contact rodrigues@ifi.uzh.ch

[1] Bruno Rodrigues, Thomas Bocek, David Hausheer, Andri Lareida, Sina Rafati, Burkhard Stiller. A Blockchain-based Architecture for Collaborative DDoS Mitigation with Smart Contracts and SDN. 11th International Conference on Autonomous Infrastructure, Management and Security (AIMS 2017). July 10-14, Zurich, Switzerland. To appear.