A Low-cost Active Defense Mechanism against DDoS Attacks in Streaming Media Scenarios

Abstract

Streaming is the new form of video transmission, and after its development in recent year, streaming video has become popular in our life. Major video websites also widely favor streaming video's immediacy and low consumption characteristics. However, streaming media faces many security threats, such as the most widespread Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks. The attacker initiates too much traffic by manipulating many bot clients, which can cause the server to overload and stop service. Therefore, this will threaten the security and availability of the server. To defend against DDoS attacks in streaming media, this paper proposes a low-consumption active defense mechanism that allows clients to be assigned to different streaming servers when requesting different video clips. One of the controller assignment algorithms enables clients to be assigned to different streaming servers in a balanced manner. Through simulation and comparison experiments, our proposed defense mechanism can effectively cope with DDoS attacks in streaming scenarios and ensure the security of servers and the viewing quality of users.