arXiv subjects
Publications and source records attributed to Dimitrios Gkounis.
We experimentally demonstrate, for the first time, DDoS mitigation of QKD-based networks utilizing a software defined network application. Successful quantum-secured link allocation is achieved after a DDoS attack based on real-time monitoring of quantum parameters
Link-flooding attacks have the potential to disconnect even entire countries from the Internet. Moreover, newly proposed indirect link-flooding attacks, such as 'Crossfire', are extremely hard to expose and, subsequently, mitigate effectively. Traffic Engineering (TE) is the network's natural way of mitigating link overload events, balancing the load and restoring connectivity. This work poses the question: Do we need a new kind of TE to expose an attack as well? The key idea is that a carefully crafted, attack-aware TE could force the attacker to follow improbable traffic patterns, revealing his target and his identity over time. We show that both existing and novel TE modules can efficiently expose the attack, and study the benefits of each approach. We implement defense prototypes using simulation mechanisms and evaluate them extensively on multiple real topologies.
In this work, we propose online traffic engineering as a novel approach to detect and mitigate an emerging class of stealthy Denial of Service (DoS) link-flooding attacks. Our approach exploits the Software Defined Networking (SDN) paradigm, which renders the management of network traffic more flexible through centralised flow-level control and monitoring. We implement a full prototype of our solution on an emulated SDN environment using OpenFlow to interface with the network devices. We further discuss useful insights gained from our preliminary experiments as well as a number of open research questions which constitute work in progress.