Aggregate-Based Congestion Control for Pulse-Wave DDoS Defense


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Date

2022-08

Publication Type

Conference Paper

ETH Bibliography

yes

Citations

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Rights / License

Abstract

Pulse-wave DDoS attacks are a new type of volumetric attack formed by short, high-rate traffic pulses. Such attacks target the Achilles' heel of state-of-The-Art DDoS defenses: Their reaction time. By continuously adapting their attack vectors, pulse-wave attacks manage to render existing defenses ineffective. In this paper, we leverage programmable switches to build an in-network DDoS defense effective against pulse-wave attacks. To do so, we revisit Aggregate-based Congestion Control (ACC): A mechanism proposed two decades ago to manage congestion events caused by high-bandwidth traffic aggregates. While ACC proved efficient in inferring and controlling DDoS attacks, it cannot keep up with the speed requirements of pulse-wave attacks. We propose ACC-Turbo, a renewed version of ACC that infers attack patterns by applying online-clustering techniques in the network and mitigates them by leveraging programmable packet scheduling. By doing so, ACC-Turbo identifies attacks at line rate and in real-Time, and rate-limits attack traffic on a per-packet basis. We fully implement ACC-Turbo in P4 and evaluate it on a wide range of attack scenarios. Our evaluation shows that ACC-Turbo autonomously identifies DDoS attack vectors in an unsupervised manner and rapidly mitigates pulse-wave DDoS attacks. We also show that ACC-Turbo runs on existing hardware (Intel Tofino).

Publication status

published

Editor

Book title

SIGCOMM '22: Proceedings of the ACM SIGCOMM 2022 Conference

Journal / series

Volume

Pages / Article No.

693 - 706

Publisher

Association for Computing Machinery

Event

36th ACM SiGCOMM Conference (SIGCOMM 2022)

Edition / version

Methods

Software

Geographic location

Date collected

Date created

Subject

Network Security; DDoS; Pulse-Wave DDoS; ACC; Aggregate-Based Congestion Control; Programmable Scheduling; Network Defenses

Organisational unit

09477 - Vanbever, Laurent / Vanbever, Laurent check_circle

Notes

Conference lecture on August 26, 2022

Funding

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