SecEG: A Secure and Efficient Strategy against DDoS Attacks in Mobile Edge Computing

Application-layer distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks incapacitate systems by using up their resources, causing service interruptions, financial losses, and more. Consequently, advanced deep-learning techniques are used to detect and mitigate these attacks in cloud infrastructures. However, in mobile edge computing (MEC), it becomes economically impractical to equip each node with defensive resources, as these resources may largely remain unused in edge devices. Furthermore, current methods are mainly concentrated on improving the accuracy of DDoS attack detection and saving CPU resources, neglecting the effective allocation of computational power for benign tasks under DDoS attacks. To address these issues, this paper introduces SecEG, a secure and efficient strategy against DDoS attacks for MEC that integrates container-based task isolation with lightweight online anomaly detection on edge nodes. More specifically, a new model is proposed to analyze resource contention dynamics between DDoS attacks and benign tasks. Subsequently, by employing periodic packet sampling and real-time attack intensity predicting, an autoencoder-based method is proposed to detect DDoS attacks. We leverage an efficient scheduling method to optimize the edge resource allocation and the service quality for benign users during DDoS attacks. When executed in the real-world edge environment, our experimental findings validate the efficacy of the proposed SecEG strategy. Compared to conventional methods, the service rate of benign requests increases by 23% under intense DDoS attacks, and the CPU resource is saved up to 35%.