Blackholing at IXPs: On the Effectiveness of DDoS Mitigation in the Wild

DDoS attacks remain a serious threat not only to the edge of the Internet but also to the core peering links at Internet Exchange Points (IXPs). Currently, the main mitigation technique is to blackhole traffic to a specific IP prefix at upstream providers. Blackholing is an operational technique that allows a peer to announce a prefix via BGP to another peer, which then discards traffic destined for this prefix. However, as far as we know there is only anecdotal evidence of the success of blackholing.