Mitigating DDoS attacks with transparent and intelligent fast-flux swarm network

Distributed denial of service attacks are a great threat to service availability in cloud computing. In recent years, DDoS attacks have increased tremendously in bandwidth and technique. In this article, we propose a novel approach to mitigate DDoS attacks using an intelligent fast-flux swarm network. An intelligent swarm network is required to ensure autonomous coordination and allocation of swarm nodes to perform its relaying operations. We adapted the Intelligent Water Drop algorithm for distributed and parallel optimization. The fast-flux technique was used to maintain connectivity between swarm nodes, clients, and servers. Fast-flux service networks also allow us to build a transparent service, which allows minimal modifications of existing cloud services (e.g. HTTP, SMTP). A software simulation consisting of 400,000 client nodes and 10,000 swarm nodes has shown that we can maintain 99.96 percent packet delivery ratio when the network is under attack from a similarly sized DDoS network of 10,000 dedicated malicious nodes.