Multiagent Router Throttling: Decentralized Coordinated Response Against DDoS Attacks

Abstract

Distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks constitute a rapidly evolving threat in the current Internet. In this paper we introduce Multiagent Router Throttling, a decentralized DDoS response mechanism in which a set of upstream routers independently learn to throttle traffic towards a victim server. We compare our approach against a baseline and a popular throttling technique from the literature, and we show that our proposed approach is more secure, reliable and cost-effective. Furthermore, our approach outperforms the baseline technique and either outperforms or has the same performance as the popular one.