Backward Traffic Throttling to Mitigate Network Floods
Yehoshua Gev, Moti Geva, Amir Herzberg · 2012
We present Backward Traffic Throttling (BTT), an efficient, decentralized mechanism, coping with congestion situations and mitigating network-flooding attacks. Upon congestion detection, a BTT node throttles the traffic of its incoming links, and notifies neighboring BTT nodes of the throtting. The notification allows the upstream nodes to perform additional throttling closer to the traffic source. The throttling parameters (e.g., the rate limit) are determined separately at each node, using typical traffic estimations. BTT can serve as a barrier against a variety of network-based attacks and congestion conditions. Both simulation and emulation experiments were performed to asses the effectiveness of BTT during distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks. Results show that even limited BTT deployment alleviates attacks damage and allowing legitimate TCP traffic to sustain communication, whereas larger deployments maintain large portion of the original bandwidth.