Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attacks continue to plague the Internet. Attacks have significant effects on social media, content and many other Internet services. Malicious actors are becoming increasingly sophisticated and are employing methods to hide their attack origins, amplify the size of their attacks, and use huge botnets that simply overwhelm their targets. This project directly addresses these advanced attacks by developing and deploying a defense in depth approach, called Deep Layers, to mitigate the types of DDoS attacks seen most recently. Deep Layers will be deployed to protect B-Root, the critical infrastructure that is one of thirteen providers of the Domain Name System (DNS) service for the top level (root) of Internet names that begin with www.
The Deep Layers solution to DDoS attacks integrates two approaches to filter spoofed traffic, two approaches to identify known-good traffic (hop-count filtering and prioritization of known-good clients), with the addition of a cloud-based scaling component to handle the largest attacks. The combination of these steps address an array of increasingly sophisticated attacks, ranging from those seen today to those that would be possible in the future, significantly increasing DNS resilience to DDoS attacks. The project integrates and extends several recent successful research approaches to DDoS defense and demonstrates their effectiveness on the B-root critical infrastructure. The project demonstrates Deep layers on the B-Root DNS server, and makes it available to other DNS operations as open source software. The work vastly improves the reliability of the DNS critical infrastructure, benefiting all Internet users.
