Improving the resilience of content distribution networks to large scale distributed denial of service attacks

Abstract

Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks remain a daunting challenge for Internet service providers. Previous work on countering these attacks has focused primarily on attacks at a single server location and the associated network infrastructure. Increasingly, however, high-volume sites are served via content distribution networks (CDNs). In this paper, we propose two mechanisms to withstand and deter DDoS attacks on CDN-hosted Web sites and the CDN infrastructure. First, we present a novel CDN request routing algorithm which allows CDN proxies to effectively distinguish attacks from the requests from actual users. The proposed scheme, based on the keyed hash function, can significantly improve the resilience of CDNs to DDoS attacks. In particular, the resilience of a CDN, consisting of n proxies, becomes O(n^2) with the proposed approach, when compared to a site hosted by a single server. We present performance numbers from a controlled test environment to show that the proposed approach is effective. Second, we introduce novel site allocation algorithms based on the well-established theory on binary codes. The proposed allocation algorithm guarantees an upper bound on the level of service outage of a CDN-hosted site even when a DoS attack on another site on the same CDN has been successful. Together, our schemes significantly improve the resilience of the Web sites hosted by CDNs, and complement other work on countering DoS.