Internet Denial of Service: Attack and Defense Mechanisms

Chapter 5. An Overview of DDoS Defenses

How can we defend against the difficult problems raised by distributed denial-of-service attacks? As discussed in Chapter 4, there are two classes of victims of DDoS attacks: the owners of machines that have been compromised to serve as DDoS agents and the final targets of DDoS attacks. Defending against the former attack is the same as defending against any other attempt to compromise your machine. We will concentrate in this chapter on the issue of defending the final target of the DDoS attack—the machine or network that the attacker wishes to deny service to.

We will begin by discussing the aspects of DDoS attacks that make defending against them difficult. We will then discuss the types of challenges ...