Self-Aware Approach to Denial of Service Defence

Denial of service attacks, viruses and worms are com-mon tools for malicious adversarial behaviour in networks. In this paper we propose the use of our autonomic routing protocol, the Cognitive Packet Network (CPN), as a means to defend nodes from Distributed Denial of Service Attacks (DDoS), where one or more attackers generate flooding traffic from multiple sources towards selected nodes or IP addresses. We use both analytical and simulation mod-elling, and experiments on our CPN testbed, to evaluate the advantages and disadvantages of our approach in the pres-ence of imperfect detection of DDoS attacks, and of false alarms.