Too Expensive to Attack: Enlarge the Attack Expense through Joint Defense at the Edge

TL;DR

This paper proposes a joint edge defense framework that significantly increases the attack costs for DDoS attackers, effectively deterring future attacks by making them economically unviable.

Contribution

It introduces a novel joint defense strategy at the edge that substantially raises attacker expenses, addressing gaps in current DDoS mitigation approaches.

Findings

Attack expenses can increase up to thousands of times.

The proposed framework effectively deters attackers by making attacks economically unfeasible.

Experimental results validate the effectiveness of the joint defense approach.

Abstract

The distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack is detrimental to businesses and individuals as people are heavily relying on the Internet. Due to remarkable profits, crackers favor DDoS as cybersecurity weapons to attack a victim. Even worse, edge servers are more vulnerable. Current solutions lack adequate consideration to the expense of attackers and inter-defender collaborations. Hence, we revisit the DDoS attack and defense, clarifying the advantages and disadvantages of both parties. We further propose a joint defense framework to defeat attackers by incurring a significant increment of required bots and enlarging attack expenses. The quantitative evaluation and experimental assessment showcase that such expense can surge up to thousands of times. The skyrocket of expenses leads to heavy loss to the cracker, which prevents further attacks.