Summer Research 2017: Week 2

This week, I continued my literary review/research on DDoS attacks and games/simulations. I began with the publication "Alliance Formation for DDoS Defense". I chose this publication because it begins to go in-depth with the features of DDoS that make defense against attacks difficult. Essentially, the three features are large volume, seemingly legitimate packets, and IP spoofing. The large volume involves "attack streams that form a large-volume flow that is likely to overwhelm any defense system". Additionally, attack packets can be similar to real packets, considering the attacker "only needs volume, not content, to inflict damage". Lastly, with IP spoofing, attackers "commonly place a fake address in the IP source field of attack packets". Each of these will serve a purpose in understanding what makes DDoS attacks so effective, thereby giving direction for game elements that would be most effective in bringing real world understanding for players. I also reviewed "Mitigating Browser-based DDoS Attacks using CORP". This publication analyzes browser based DDoS attacks and CORP (Cross Origin Request Policy), which "intercepts the cross-origin requests and blocks unwanted requests by the server". This method helps alleviate some of the load from the server to assist in weakening the attack. This is a idea for a defense mechanic to use in gameplay that would be simpler to implement, in theory.