Denial of Service Elusion (DoSE): Keeping Clients Connected for Less

Abstract

Denial of Service (DoS) attacks continue to grow in magnitude, duration, and frequency increasing the demand for techniques to protect services from disruption, especially at a low cost. We present Denial of Service Elusion (DoSE) as an inexpensive method for mitigating network layer attacks by utilizing cloud infrastructure and content delivery networks to protect services from disruption. DoSE uses these services to create a relay network between the client and the protected service that evades attack by selectively releasing IP address information. DoSE incorporates client reputation as a function of prior behavior to stop attackers along with a feedback controller to limit costs. We evaluate DoSE by modeling relays, clients, and attackers in an agent-based MATLAB simulator. The results show DoSE can mitigate a single-insider attack on 1,000 legitimate clients in 3.9 minutes while satisfying an average of 88.2% of requests during the attack.