Economic Rebalancing of the Costs and Benefits of Volumetric Ddos Mitigation in the Internet : A Case Study of Tcp

The Internet is now critical global infrastructure. Effective mitigation strategies are needed to address the increased risk of socio-economic harms from cybersecurity attacks. In this paper, we propose a novel mitigation strategy for a popular mode of attack: volumetric “Distributed Denial of Service” or DDoS attacks. Such attacks operate by generating large volumes of otherwise apparently legitimate traffic that is directed so as to interfere with the ability of target victim resources to process legitimate traffic. The mitigation strategy proposed here is novel in that it holistically considers the technical and economic implications of successful mitigation responses in its design and evaluation. First, the strategy shifts the cost-burden of mitigation from victims to attackers, reversing the traditional approach. Second, the mitigation benefits start even before a DDoS attack is launched, contrary to alternative approaches. Third, the evaluation of the strategy's efficacy considers both situational features (e.g. the quality of service needed for particular applications, bottleneck link capacity, etc.) as well as the costs and benefits of deploying and operating the mitigation strategy. This smooths the path to commercial deployment