MIDAS: An Impact Scale for DDoS attacks

Abstract

We usually have well-defined classification scales to estimate the intensity and impact of natural disasters. Prominent examples are the Richter and the Fujita scales for measuring earthquakes and tornadoes respectively. In this paper, we apply similar ideas to estimate the impact of distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks from the perspective of network operators. Devising such a classification scale improves our understanding of DDoS attacks by assessing the actual damage incurred from an ISP's perspective, and allows comparison of various mitigation strategies. We have designed MIDAS, a DDoS impact scale, based on the economic impact of a DDoS attack, calculated using economic and network data. We then present an approximation of the MIDAS scale that relies only on network measurements for ease of computation. To demonstrate the usefulness of the scale, we perform sensitivity analysis to qualitatively validate the magnitude of the scale value for diverse attacks.