Path attestation scheme to avert DDoS flood attacks

DDoS mitigation schemes are increasingly becoming relevant in the Internet. The main hurdle faced by such schemes is the "nearly indistinguishable" line between malicious traffic and genuine traffic. It is best tackled with a paradigm shift in connection handling by attesting the path. We therefore propose the scheme called "Path Attestation Scheme" coupled with a metric called "Confidence Index" to tackle the problem of distinguishing malicious and genuine traffic in a progressive manner, with varying levels of certainty. We support our work through an experimental study to establish the stability of Internet topology by using 134 different global Internet paths over a period of 16 days. Our Path Attestation Scheme was able to successfully distinguish between malicious and genuine traffic, 85% of the time. The scheme presupposes support from a fraction of routers in the path. © 2010 Springer-Verlag.