Protecting web applications from DDoS attacks by an active distributed defense system

Abstract

In the last a few years a number of highly publicized incidents of Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks against high‐profile government and commercial websites have made people aware of the importance of providing data and services security to users. A DDoS attack is an availability attack, which is characterized by an explicit attempt from an attacker to prevent legitimate users of a service from using the desired resources. This paper introduces the vulnerability of web applications to DDoS attacks, and presents an active distributed defense system that has a deployment mixture of sub‐systems to protect web applications from DDoS attacks. According to the simulation experiments, this system is effective in that it is able to defend web applications against attacks. It can avoid overall network congestion and provide more resources to legitimate web users.