Protecting Resources Against Volumetric and Non-volumetric Network Attacks

Cyber attacks are growing with the increase in internet usage. In a volumetric attack, the target resource is taken down with a huge amount of traffic. Distributed denial-of-service and link flooding attacks are examples of these types of attacks. In a non-volumetric attack, the attackers try to steal or get illegal authorization of some resources in a network. This type of attack can be severe even with a small amount of traffic. Non-volumetric attacks can be stopped by applying a moving target defense approach at the nodes on the attack path. An attack path is a series of steps and the attacker needs to succeed in all of those steps to gain access to the resources. In this paper, we propose an architecture to defend against both types of attacks. We formulate a problem to minimize the damage caused by the volumetric attack by using a limited number of blockage at some routers. This problem is NP-hard and we provide a greedy solution and provide an approximation ratio of it. We formulate another optimization problem to minimize the damage while securing the resources by deploying the minimum number of moving target defense methods. We provide a dynamic programming based solution to this problem. We conduct an extensive simulation to support our proposed models.