The Age of DDoScovery: An Empirical Comparison of Industry and Academic DDoS Assessments

TL;DR

This paper compares industry and academic assessments of DDoS attack trends, highlighting discrepancies, proposing a new collaborative method, and emphasizing the importance of validation for improving Internet security understanding.

Contribution

It introduces a novel collaborative approach for data sharing between industry and academia to identify gaps and validate DDoS attack data, fostering better convergence of insights.

Findings

Discrepancies exist between industry reports and academic data sources.

A new method of sharing aggregated target lists reveals visibility gaps.

Analysis shows a reported decline in reflection-amplification attacks in 2021-2022.

Abstract

Motivated by the impressive but diffuse scope of DDoS research and reporting, we undertake a multistakeholder (joint industry-academic) analysis to seek convergence across the best available macroscopic views of the relative trends in two dominant classes of attacks - direct-path attacks and reflection-amplification attacks. We first analyze 24 industry reports to extract trends and (in)consistencies across observations by commercial stakeholders in 2022. We then analyze ten data sets spanning industry and academic sources, across four years (2019-2023), to find and explain discrepancies based on data sources, vantage points, methods, and parameters. Our method includes a new approach: we share an aggregated list of DDoS targets with industry players who return the results of joining this list with their proprietary data sources to reveal gaps in visibility of the academic data sources. We use academic data sources to explore an industry-reported relative drop in spoofed reflection-amplification attacks in 2021-2022. Our study illustrates the value, but also the challenge, in independent validation of security-related properties of Internet infrastructure. Finally, we reflect on opportunities to facilitate greater common understanding of the DDoS landscape. We hope our results inform not only future academic and industry pursuits but also emerging policy efforts to reduce systemic Internet security vulnerabilities.