Mobile-Agent-Based Network Cooperative Security Architecture against Distributed Denial-of-Service Attacks

Abstract

The objective of the Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attacks is to paralyze the server and the provided services. Attackers usually intrude a group of hosts, and organize these hosts into a hierarchy. The intruded hosts located in the leaves of the hierarchy may be commanded to simultaneously send a large amount of attacking packets to the victim to interrupt or stop its services. It is very difficult to pursue the real attacker. A network cooperative security architecture using the mobile agent technology is proposed in the paper, to reduce the impact of the DDoS attacks on the services provided by the victim. As long as possible DDoS attacks are detected, the server on the victim will be replicated and moved to other network nodes that support the execution environment of mobile agents. Thus the service still survives. The paper also proposes two types of mobile agents, the monitoring agent and the server agent, to cooperate in the defense of the DDoS attacks.