Light-Weight DDoS Mitigation at Network Edge with Limited Resources

Abstract: The Internet of Things (IoT) has been growing rapidly in recent years. With the appearance of 5G, it is expected to become even more indispensable to people's lives. In accordance with the increase of Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attacks from IoT devices, DDoS defense has become a hot research topic. DDoS detection mechanisms executed on routers and SDN environments have been intensely studied. However, these methods have the disadvantage of requiring the cost and performance of the devices. In addition, there is no existing DDoS mitigation algorithm on the network edge that can be performed with the low-cost and low performance equipments. Therefore, this paper proposes a light-weight DDoS mitigation scheme at the network edge using limited resources of inexpensive devices such as home gateways. The goal of the proposed scheme is to simply detect and mitigate flooding attacks. It utilizes unused queue resources to detect malicious flows by random shuffling of queue allocation and discard the packets of the detected flows. The performance of the proposed scheme was confirmed via theoretical analysis and computer simulation. The simulation results match the theoretical results and the proposed algorithm can efficiently detect malicious flows using limited resources.