Summer Research 2017: Week 9

This week I continued my literary review for DDoS. I began with "Multiplayer Game for DDoS Attacks Resilience in Ad hoc Networks" by A. Michalas et al. This paper was about a multiplayer game to prevent Distributed Denial of Service attack (DDoS) in ad hoc networks. One benefit of their research was the inclusion of a specific scenario of a DDoS attack. On the 6th of August, 2009, there was a coordinated attack to take down two of the world’s most popular social media sites: Facebook and Twitter. This provides me with a specific example I can look into to discover how the attack was formulated and what affect it had on the sites during that time. I also found their game approach of cryptographic puzzles and game theory to be an interesting concept to incorporate into our next game. Considering the mass overflow of data being pushed to flood the infrastructure, one concept for our game that I have is a puzzle-type game with fast moving pieces. The player will need to maneuver parts into the correct order quickly, only being allowed 2 improper moves.

I also read "Game-Theoretical Effectiveness Evaluation of DDoS Defense" by P. Shi and Y. Lian. I chose this article because it discussed something I had not come across in previous publications. It talks about how current evaluation research (paper was published in 2008) generalizes evaluation criteria, but does not include concrete compare applications. Additionally, the comparative criteria is not necessarily accurate. Some evaluation of DDoS defense mechanisms operate on the premise that "DDoS attack packets and legitimate packets can be differentiated clearly", which is not true in the case of practical network warfare. I found this to be critical information to keep in mind during the development of our game. If the packets cannot be differentiated clearly, there needs to be some element in our game that requires specific attention to detail.