Throttling DDoS attacks using discrete logarithm problem

Abstract

Amongst all the security issues that the internet world is facing, Distributed Denial of Service attack (DDoS) receives special mention. In a typical DDoS attack, an attacker runs a malicious code on compromised systems to generate enormous number of requests to a single web server. The flood of incoming requests makes the victim web server resources to wear out completely within a short period of time; thereby causing denial of service to the legitimate users. In this paper we propose a solution to trim down the impact of DDoS attacks by throttling the client's CPU i.e., to make clients pay a stamp fee which is collected in terms of resource usage such as CPU cycles. Our proposed solution makes use of the discrete logarithm problem to generate the CPU stamps.