Dealing with Denial-of-Service Attacks in Active and Programmable Infrastructures

Denial of Service (DoS) attacks is a well-known problem with victims even among prestigious commercial sites. Such attacks in traditional networking are difficult to recognize and to handle. An active infrastructure that can dynamically respond to event-triggered requests can deal better with recognition and handling of DoS attacks. We present here a DoS attack response system architecture and we demonstrate via an application scenario its dynamicity and flexibility in dealing with this kind of attacks. The approach is based on agent-enabled active programmable infrastructures and makes heavy use of the mobile agent technology in order to asynchronously respond to critical situations. Finally we comment on the pros and cons of our approach and discuss future directions that could be followed.