Information Sciences Group

With a long history of compromising Internet security, Dis-tributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attacks have been inten-sively investigated and numerous countermeasures have been proposed to defend against them. In this work, we propose a non-standard game-theoretic framework that facilitates evaluation of DDoS attacks and defense. Our framework can be used to study diverse DDoS attack scenarios where multiple layers of protection are deployed and a number of uncertain factors affect the decision making of the players, and it also allows us to model different sophistication lev-els of reasoning by both the attacker and the defender. We conduct a variety of experiments to evaluate DDoS attack and defense scenarios where one or more layers of defense mechanisms are deployed, and demonstrate that our frame-work sheds light on the interplay between decision makings of both the attacker and the defender, as well as how they affect the outcomes of DDoS attack and defense games