A Lightweight Mechanism to Mitigate Application Layer DDoS Attacks

Abstract. Application layer DDoS attacks, to which network layer solutions is not applicable as attackers are indistinguishable based on packets or protocols, prevent legitimate users from accessing services. In this paper, we propose Trust Management Helmet (TMH ) as a partial solution to this problem, which is a lightweight mitigation mechanism that uses trust to differentiate legitimate users and attackers. Its key insight is that a server should give priority to protecting the connectivity of good users during application layer DDoS attacks, instead of identifying all the attack requests. The trust to clients is evaluated based on their visiting history, and used to schedule the service to their requests. We introduce license, for user identification (even beyond NATs) and storing the trust information at clients. The license is cryptographically secured against forgery or replay attacks. We realize this mitigation mechanism and implement it as a Java package and use it for simul...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2009
• Where: INFOSCALE
• Authors: Jie Yu, Chengfang Fang, Liming Lu, Zhoujun Li
• Keywords: Application Layer Ddos, Information System, INFOSCALE 2009, Legitimate Users, Mitigation Mechanism