Comparing DDoS Mitigation Techniques

Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks are becoming more frequent and the size of these attacks is increasing. This increases the load on the networks of Internet Service Providers (ISPs), while also taking websites offline. Nowadays, many companies rely on Internet applications (banking, communication) for their core business. As such, outages of Internet applications can have a big financial impact on companies that provide these services. Therefore, the market for DDoS Protection Services (DPSs) is rising. Several companies provide services to protect against DDoS attacks. These services do not all work the same. Some companies provide services such as a reverse proxy-based solution or a solution that relies on the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP), the routing protocol of the Internet. This raises some questions: why are different underlying techniques used and what is the difference between them? This paper compares commonly used methods of mitigating DDoS attacks, which will provide a thorough understanding of the advantages and disadvantages of these techniques.