Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Attacks and Defense Mechanisms in Various Web-Enabled Computing Platforms: Issues, Challenges, and Future Research Directions

The demand for Internet security has escalated in the last two decades because the rapid proliferation in the number of Internet users has presented attackers with new detrimental opportunities. One of the simple yet powerful attack, lurking around the Internet today, is the Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attack. The expeditious surge in the collaborative environments, like IoT, cloud computing and SDN, have provided attackers with countless new avenues to benefit from the distributed nature of DDoS attacks. The attackers protect their anonymity by infecting distributed devices and utilizing them to create a bot army to constitute a large-scale attack. Thus, the development of an effective as well as efficient DDoS defense mechanism becomes an immediate goal. In this exposition, we present a DDoS threat analysis along with a few novel ground-breaking defense mechanisms proposed by various researchers for numerous domains. Further, we talk about popular performance metrics that evaluate the defense schemes. In the end, we list prevalent DDoS attack tools and open challenges.