Chen, Ang, Akshay Sriraman, Tavish Vaidya, Yuankai Zhang, Andreas Haeberlen, Boon Thau Loo, Linh Thi Xuan Phan, Micah Sherr, Clay Shields, and Wenchao Zhou. “Dispersing Asymmetric DDoS Attacks with SplitStack.” In ACM Workshop on Hot Topics in Networks (HotNets), 2016.

This paper presents SplitStack, an architecture targeted at mitigating asymmetric DDoS attacks. These attacks are particularly challenging, since attackers can use a limited amount of resources to trigger exhaustion of a particular type of system resource on the server side. SplitStack resolves this by splitting the monolithic stack into many separable components called minimum splittable units (MSUs). If part of the application stack is experiencing a DDoS attack, SplitStack massively replicates just the affected MSUs, potentially across many machines. This allows scaling of the impacted resource separately from the rest of the application stack, so that resources can be precisely added where needed to combat the attack. We validate SplitStack via a preliminary case study, and show that it outperforms naive replication in defending against asymmetric attacks.

@inproceedings{splitstack-hotnets,
  author = {Chen, Ang and Sriraman, Akshay and Vaidya, Tavish and Zhang, Yuankai and Haeberlen, Andreas and Loo, Boon Thau and Phan, Linh Thi Xuan and Sherr, Micah and Shields, Clay and Zhou, Wenchao},
  booktitle = {ACM Workshop on Hot Topics in Networks (HotNets)},
  month = nov,
  title = {{Dispersing Asymmetric DDoS Attacks with SplitStack}},
  year = {2016}
}