Countermeasures against Distributed Denial of Service A Literature Review

A distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack is carried out by simultaneously by compromised systems against targets causing system and service unavailability. Regardless of industry and size, companies worldwide are increasingly becoming target of DDOS attacks. The sophistication and intensity of these attacks are exponentially rising due to increase in number of compromised systems, unpatched vulnerabilities and increased business impact. The paper reviews more than 200 research articles in the area of DDOS, of which 142 present countermeasures and mitigation against DDOS. The paper develops an ontological framework to classify the proposed mitigation methods under three layers of defense-in-depth prevent, detect and respond. Research done each of these 3 pillars are further conceptualized based on underlying design and security principles. The paper also proposes alternate classification schemes based on placements of target components, while presenting qualitative analyses on research activities on DDOS