Stateful Anycast for DDoS Mitigation
Author(s)
Hansen, Richard E.
Advisor(s)
Karen Sollins
Date Issued
June 21, 2007
Series/Report no.
Massachusetts Institute of Technology Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory
Abstract
Distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks can easily cripple victim hosts or networks, yet effective defenses remain elusive. Normal anycast can be used to force the diffusion of attack traffic over a group of several hosts to increase the difficulty of saturating resources at or near any one of the hosts. However, because a packet sent to the anycast group may be delivered to any member, anycast does not support protocols that require a group member to maintain state (such as TCP). This makes anycast impractical for most applications of interest.This document describes the design of Stateful Anycast, a conceptual anycast-like network service based on IP anycast. Stateful Anycast is designed to support stateful sessions without losing anycast’s ability to defend against DDoS attacks. Stateful Anycast employs a set of anycasted proxies to direct packets to the proper stateholder. These proxies provide DDoS protection by dropping a session’s packets upon group member request. Stateful Anycast is incrementally deployable and can scale to support many groups.
Description
MEng thesis
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