John Heidemann / Papers / Anycast Agility: Network Playbooks to Fight DDoS

Anycast Agility: Network Playbooks to Fight DDoS
A S M Rizvi, Leandro Bertholdo, João Ceron and John Heidemann

Citation

A S M Rizvi, Leandro Bertholdo, João Ceron and John Heidemann. Anycast Agility: Network Playbooks to Fight DDoS. Proceedings of the 31st USENIX Security Symposium (Aug. 2022), 4201–4218. [DOI] [PDF] [alt PDF]

Abstract

IP anycast is used for services such as DNS and Content Delivery Networks (CDN) to provide the capacity to handle Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attacks. During a DDoS attack service operators redistribute traffic between anycast sites to take advantage of sites with unused or greater capacity. Depending on site traffic and attack size, operators may instead concentrate attackers in a few sites to preserve operation in others. Operators use these actions during attacks, but how to do so has not been described systematically or publicly. This paper describes several methods to use BGP to shift traffic when under DDoS, and shows that a response playbook can provide a menu of responses that are options during an attack. To choose an appropriate response from this playbook, we also describe a new method to estimate true attack size, even though the operator’s view during the attack is incomplete. Finally, operator choices are constrained by distributed routing policies, and not all are helpful. We explore how specific anycast deployment can constrain options in this playbook, and are the first to measure how generally applicable they are across multiple anycast networks.

Bibtex Citation

@inproceedings{Rizvi22a,
  author = {Rizvi, {A S M} and Bertholdo, Leandro and Ceron, Jo{\~a}o and Heidemann, John},
  title = {Anycast Agility: Network Playbooks to Fight {DDoS}},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the 31st {USENIX} Security Symposium },
  year = {2022},
  sortdate = {2022-08-10},
  project = {ant, ddidd, paaddos, sabres},
  jsubject = {network_security},
  pages = {4201--4218},
  month = aug,
  publisher = {{USENIX}},
  jlocation = {johnh: pafile},
  keywords = {anycast, ddos, routing},
  doi = {to appear},
  blogurl = {https://ant.isi.edu/blog/?p=1829},
  url = {https://ant.isi.edu/%7ejohnh/PAPERS/Rizvi22a.html},
  pdfurl = {https://ant.isi.edu/%7ejohnh/PAPERS/Rizvi22a.pdf},
  oldotherurl = {https://www.usenix.org/system/files/sec22fall_rizvi.pdf},
  otherurl = {https://www.usenix.org/conference/usenixsecurity22/presentation/rizvi},
  dataurl = {https://zenodo.org/record/6473023},
  talkurl = {https://www.usenix.org/conference/usenixsecurity22/presentation/rizvi}
}
Copyright © by John Heidemann