A Demonstration of the DeDoS Platform for Defusing Asymmetric DDoS Attacks in Data Centers

Henri Maxime Demoulin, Tavish Vaidya, Isaac Pedisich, Nik Sultana, Bowen Wang, Jingyu Qian, Yuankai Zhang, Ang Chen, Andreas Haeberlen, Boon Thau Loo, Linh Thi Xuan Phan, Micah Sherr, Clay Shields, Wenchao Zhou

Abstract: We propose a demonstration of DeDoS, a platform for mitigating asymmetric DDoS attacks. These attacks are particularly challenging since attackers using limited resources can exhaust the resources of even well-provisioned servers. DeDoS resolves this by splitting monolithic software stacks into separable components called minimum splittable units (MSUs). If part of the application stack is experiencing a DDoS attack, DeDoS can massively replicate only the affected MSUs, potentially across many machines. This allows scaling of the impacted resource separately from the rest of the application stack so that resources can be precisely added where needed to combat the attack. Our demonstration will show that DeDoS incurs reasonable overheads in normal operations and that it significantly outperforms naïve replication when defending against a range of asymmetric attacks.