Modern DDoS Attacks and Defences -- Survey

TL;DR

This survey reviews modern DDoS attack techniques and defense strategies, emphasizing recent methods involving virtual machines and network function virtualization to improve detection and mitigation efforts.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive summary of recent DDoS attack methods and evaluates innovative defense techniques like HoneyMesh, VGuard, and VFence.

Findings

Virtual machine-based defenses like HoneyMesh show promise.

Network function virtualization enhances DDoS mitigation.

Detection techniques are continually evolving to counter new attack methods.

Abstract

Denial of Service (DoS) and Distributed Denial of Service of Service (DDoS) attacks are commonly used to disrupt network services. Attack techniques are always improving and due to the structure of the internet and properties of network protocols it is difficult to keep detection and mitigation techniques up to date. A lot of research has been conducted in this area which has demonstrated the difficulty of preventing DDoS attacks altogether, therefore the primary aim of most research is to maximize quality of service (QoS) for legitimate users. This survey paper aims to provide a clear summary of DDoS attacks and focuses on some recently proposed techniques for defence. The research papers that are analysed in depth primarily focused on the use of virtual machines (VMs) (HoneyMesh) and network function virtualization (NFV) (VGuard and VFence).