We consider a cloud based multiserver system consisting of a set of replica application servers behind a set of proxy (indirection) servers which interact directly with clients over the Internet. We study a proactive moving-target defense to thwart a DDoS attacker's reconnaissance phase and consequently reduce the attack's impact. The defense is effectively a moving-target (motag) technique in which the proxies dynamically change. The system is evaluated using an AWS prototype of HTTP redirection and by numerical evaluations of an adversarial coupon-collector mathematical model, the latter allowing larger-scale extrapolations.
@article{arxiv.1712.01102,
title = {Moving-target Defense against Botnet Reconnaissance and an Adversarial Coupon-Collection Model},
author = {Neda Nasiriani and Yuquan Shan and George Kesidis and Takis Konstantopoulos and Daniel Fleck and Angelos Stavrou},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1712.01102},
year = {2018}
}