Understanding DoS protection services

Details

Supervisors

Sadre, Ramin

Faculty

Ecole polytechnique de Louvain

Degree label

Master [120] : ingénieur civil en informatique

Abstract

Among the various existing online attacks, Denial of Service (DoS) is the most problematic one. Thanks to amplification and reflection, coordinated attacks from large botnets can now generate several hundreds of Gbps of attack traffic, becoming a serious problem even for large server infrastructures. Given that traditional network defenses can't handle such attacks anymore, several companies, such as Cloudflare and Akamai, offer services to protect websites and other infrastructures from DoS attacks. But since these are commercial companies, the used technologies are not documented. This master's thesis studies available DoS protection services, analyses their strengths and weaknesses and tries to guess which mechanisms are used to filter legitimate traffic from large floods. Another subject discussed is the potential interest for malicious users to use such protection services in order to cover their illegal activities.