Mind the Amplification: Cracking Content Delivery Networks via DDoS Attacks

Zihao Li, Weizhi Meng*

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingArticle in proceedingsResearchpeer-review

Abstract

A content delivery network (CDN) refers to a geographically distributed network of web servers, aiming to enhance the website performance and reliability, i.e., providing fast delivery of the Internet content. CDN is often part of a mature enterprise level network, but due to the distributed nature, CDN may be vulnerable to a distributed denial-of-service attack (DDoS), in which the cyber-attackers try to flood the victim with overloaded traffic or requests. In the literature, the impact of DDoS on CDN has not been widely studied. Motivated by this challenge, in this work, we emulate a CDN environment and investigate the effect of a particular DDoS attack on the environment. It is found that free CDN clusters could be destroyed by only several Gigabyte traffic. In the end, we also discuss some potential solutions to help defend against DDoS attacks.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationWireless Algorithms, Systems, and Applications
EditorsZhe Liu, Fan Wu, Sajal K. Das
PublisherSpringer
Publication date2021
Pages186-197
ISBN (Print)9783030861292
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2021
Event16th International Conference on Wireless Algorithms, Systems, and Applications - Nanjing, China
Duration: 25 Jun 202127 Jun 2021

Conference

Conference16th International Conference on Wireless Algorithms, Systems, and Applications
Country/TerritoryChina
CityNanjing
Period25/06/202127/06/2021
SeriesLecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics)
Volume12938 LNCS
ISSN0302-9743

Bibliographical note

Publisher Copyright:
© 2021, Springer Nature Switzerland AG.

Keywords

  • Content delivery network
  • Distributed Denial-of-Service Attack
  • Emulation and evaluation
  • Network security
  • Website server

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