Understanding Internet DDoS Mitigation from Academic and Industrial Perspectives

Defending against distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks in the Internet is a fundamental problem. One practical approach to addressing DDoS attacks is to redirect all destination (e.g., via DNS or BGP) to a third-party, DDoS protection-as-a-service provider (e.g., Cloudflare and Akamai), which is well provisioned and equipped with proprietary filtering mechanisms to remove attack traffic before passing the remaining traffic to the destination. Although such an approach is appealing, as it requires no modification to the existing Internet infrastructure and can scale to handle very large attacks, recent industrial interviews with more than 100 interviewees from over 10 industry segments reveal that this approach alone is not sufficient, especially for large organizations (e.g., Web hosting companies and government) that cannot afford to allow third-parity security-service providers to terminate their network connections. Instead, these organizations have to rely on their ISPs to filter attack traffic. In this paper, we discuss the challenges faced by the ISPs in order to disrupt the Internet security-service market and sketch our solutions, powered by smart contracts.