Summer Research 2017: Week 13

This week I worked on developing ideas for our game on DDoS attack and defense. Considering the mass overflow of data being pushed to flood the IT infrastructure during DDoS attacks, 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. Additionally, because internet traffic works in an end-to-end paradigm, sending packets between users through protocols, it leaves space open for attack by the nature of its setup. This brought forth the idea of a game where the player must escape from a flood of "packets" raining down on them before being overwhelmed by data. I also read Methodologies for evaluating game theoretic defense against DDoS attacks" by T. Khirwadkar et. al. •In this paper, they discuss how Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks on the Internet are used by attackers to be a nuisance, make a political statement (e.g. the 2009 attack against Estonia), or as a weapon of an Internet extortionist. Effective defense against these is a crucial study area, where advanced simulation techniques play a critical role, because of the enormous number of events involved. The paper considers a methodology for evaluating a game-theoretic defense against DDoS. First, they describe a basic form of the defense. Then, they noted the performance limitations that could be caused by inattentive implementation. Lastly, they considered methodologies in which a parallelized approach may accelerate performance.