Enhanced Internet security by a distributed traffic control service based on traffic ownership

Frequency and intensity of Internet attacks are rising at an alarming pace. Several technologies and concepts were proposed for fighting distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks: traceback, pushback, i3, SOS and Mayday. This paper shows that in the case of DDoS reflector attacks they are either ineffective or even counterproductive. We then propose the novel concept of traffic ownership and describe a system that extends the control over network traffic by network users to the Internet using adaptive traffic processing devices. We safely delegate partial network management capabilities from network operators to network users. All network packets with a source or destination address “owned” by a network user can now also be controlled within the Internet instead of only at the network user’s Internet uplink. By limiting the traffic control features and by restricting the realm of control to the “owner” of the traffic, we can rule out misuse of this system. Applications of our system are manifold: prevention of source address spoofing, DDoS attack mitigation, distributed firewall-like filtering, new ways of collecting traffic statistics, service level agreement validation, traceback, distributed network debugging, support for forensic analyses and many more. A use case illustrates how our system enables network users to prevent and react to DDoS attacks.