MTF: mitigating link flooding attacks in delay tolerant networks

© 2018 IEEE. The link flooding attack (LFA) is a new type of distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack emerged in recent years. Several defense mechanisms have been proposed in TCP/IP networks. However, due to the connectionless nature of Delay Tolerant Networks (DTN), the efficiency of these mechanisms is degraded facing the LFA in DTN. Thus, in this paper, we propose a new scheme named Macro Traffic Filtering (MTF), to defend the LFA in DTN efficiently. With the real prototype implementations and the long-term emulations, the preliminary results show that compared to the undifferentiated interception and the TE-based interplay scheme, MTF achieves significantly higher attack traffic hit ratio, lower collateral damage and higher cost to the attackers.