Volumetric DDoS Attack Detection and Mitigation using P4-DPDK
Samia Choueiri, Ali Mazloum, Sergio Elizalde, Elie F. Kfoury, Jorge Crichigno · 2025
Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks continue to be a major threat to network environments, with their scale and complexity increasing over time. Conventional methods, such as firewalls and scrubbing centers, struggle to cope with the high traffic volumes associated with such attacks. Other recent software and hardware approaches face significant limitations in terms of scalability, flexibility, and real-time attack mitigation. This paper presents a DDoS attack detection and mitigation system that leverages the Data Plane Development Kit (DPDK) for high-speed packet processing. The system integrates a P4-based pipeline for efficient detection and mitigation directly within the data plane. The system is evaluated in a testbed environment, while varying parameters such as the attack volume, the packet size distribution, the CPU core allocations, and others. The results show that the proposed system effectively detects and mitigates DDoS attacks while maintaining high throughput and low latency, even at a high traffic rate approaching 100Gbps. Additionally, the system is compared against a widely-used open-source IDS/IPS solution.