Towards Mitigation of Low and Slow Application DDoS Attacks

Distributed Denial of Service attacks are a growing threat to organizations and, as defense mechanisms are becoming more advanced, hackers are aiming at the application layer. For example, application layer Low and Slow Distributed Denial of Service attacks are becoming a serious issue because, due to low resource consumption, they are hard to detect. In this position paper, we propose a reference architecture that mitigates the Low and Slow Distributed Denial of Service attacks by utilizing Software Defined Infrastructure capabilities. We also propose two concrete architectures based on the reference architecture: a Performance Model-Based and Off-The-Shelf Components based architecture, respectively. We introduce the Shark Tank concept, a cluster under detailed monitoring that has full application capabilities and where suspicious requests are redirected for further filtering.