Dealing with denial-of-service attacks in agent-enabled active and programmable infrastructures

Denial of service (DoS) attacks is a well-known problem with victims even among prestigious commercial sites. Such attacks in traditional networking are difficult to recognize and to handle. An active infrastructure that can dynamically respond to event-triggered requests can deal better with recognition and handling of DoS attacks. We present a DoS attack response system architecture and we demonstrate via an application scenario its dynamicity and flexibility in dealing with this kind of attack. The approach is based on agent-enabled active programmable infrastructures and makes heavy use of mobile agent technology in order to asynchronously respond to critical situations. Finally, we comment on the pros and cons of our approach and discuss future directions that could be followed.