Adaptive Resource Management Enabling Deception (ARMED)

Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks routinely disrupt access to critical services. Mitigation of these attacks often relies on planned over-provisioning or elastic provisioning of resources, and third-party monitoring, analysis, and scrubbing of network traffic. While volumetric attacks which saturate a victim's network are most common, non-volumetric, low and slow, DDoS attacks can achieve their goals without requiring high traffic volume by targeting vulnerable network protocols or protocol implementations. Non-volumetric attacks, unlike their noisy counterparts, require more sophisticated detection mechanisms, and typically have only post-facto and targeted protocol/application mitigations. In this paper, we introduce our work under the Adaptive Resource Management Enabling Deception (ARMED) effort, which is developing a network-level approach to automatically mitigate sophisticated DDoS attacks through deception-focused adaptive maneuvering. We describe the concept, implementation, and initial evaluation of the ARMED Network Actors (ANAs) that facilitate transparent interception, sensing, analysis, and mounting of adaptive responses that can disrupt the adversary's decision process.