BDI2DoS: An application using collaborating BDI agents to combat DDoS attacks

Abstract

Computer networks are critical to many tasks in our daily lives. Therefore, mechanisms that guarantee the resilience of the network must be provided. Different approaches have been proposed to address potential challenges to network operation, but they rely on rigid solutions, which work only in anticipated scenarios. To address this issue, this paper presents BDI2DoS, which is a multi-agent innovative application that ensures the resilience of networks against the widely known Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attack. We take an existing network resilience strategy based on event–condition–action (ECA) policies to combat DDoS attacks, and use it as a requirement to specify the behaviour that must emerge from the interaction among agents, which together are capable of detecting and remediating anomalies that are considered a DDoS threat, in a flexible way. Agents in our multi-agent system follow the widely used BDI architecture, and were implemented with the BDI4JADE agent platform. In order to evaluate the effectiveness of BDI2DoS, we used the PReSET resilience simulator and BDI4JADE to build an integrated testbed. Our experiments compare the effectiveness of the ECA and the BDI-based resilience strategies and show that the latter is more flexible and able to cope with problems that occur during the execution of the anticipated behaviour.