A Survey on Solutions to Distributed Denial of Service Attacks

Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack is a large-scale, coordinated attack on the availability of services of a victim system or network resource, launched indirectly through many compromised computers on the Internet. Researchers have come up with more and more specific solutions to the DDoS problem. However, existing DDoS attack tools keep being improved and new attack techniques are developed. It is desirable to construct comprehensive DDoS solutions to current and future DDoS attack variants rather than to react with specific countermeasures. In order to assist in this, we conduct a thorough survey on the problem of DDoS. We propose taxonomies of the known and potential DDoS attack techniques and tools. Along with this, we discuss the issues and defend challenges in fighting with these attacks. Based on the new understanding of the problem, we propose classes of solutions to detect, survive and react to the DDoS attacks.