Cooperative Mitigation of DDoS Attacks Using an Optimized Auction Scheme on Cache Servers

Abstract

Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack is one of the most prevalent attacks on the internet today which attacks the availability of the server by resource and bandwidth depletion exhaustion. Many mechanisms exist to fight against DDoS attack, a set of which are the cooperative defense mechanisms which work in a distributed manner and are more robust. This work makes use of one of the latest meta-heuristic optimization techniques, Whale Optimization Algorithm (WOA) to find underutilized internet cache servers which are in best position to absorb DDoS flood. These multiple caches will absorb a part of the attack flood thus preventing the victim’s network from getting congested. For effective allocation of these cache resources a Continuous Double Auction (CDA) mechanism is applied. It is more flexible and efficient as it allows simultaneous bidding by sellers and buyers. The cache servers are selected through multi-objective WOA in MATLAB and then the auction platform is set-up using Actor Model. In cooperative defense, selection of a pricing strategy which maximizes collateral profit is very important so a round-wise bidding strategy is implemented which promotes long-term participation. For evaluation of the scheme, the workload traces of distributed servers are used to generate three scenarios under different attack load conditions. Depending on the supply-demand of free cache resources, the results show that the proposed algorithm has high detection rate of close optimum solutions. This leads to increased throughput because the attack traffic is not only shared, but is shared in a balanced way.