Countering Botnets with Botnet-Like Design
Distributed denial of service attacks (DDOS) are well understood but still difficult to combat. Read-only sites can continue to function with sufficient replication but transactional sites without distributed databases are still compromised by DDOS. Researchers at the University of Washington have a distributed system for addressing the problem.
Known as Phalanx, this model allows a single ISP to protect servers by routing traffic to the server through a series of proxies known as mailboxes. The details are described in a a recent paper:
Rather than being directly delivered, traffic is sent through a massive swarm of packet forwarders which act as mailboxes. Hosts use these mailboxes in a random order, so that even an attacker with a multimillion-node botnet can cause only a fraction of a given flow to be lost. Lightweight capabilities are then used to ensure that only requested packets are delivered from the mailboxes to the destination.
The system appears to scale to million node botnets, at least in simulations.
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