Mitigating distributed denial of service attacks with dynamic resource pricing

Distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks exploit the acute imbalance between client and server workloads to cause devastation to the service providers. We propose a distributed gateway architecture and a payment protocol that imposes dynamically changing prices on network, server, and information resources in order to push some cost of initiating service requests - in terms of monetary payments and/or computational burdens back onto the requesting clients. By employing different price and purchase functions, the architecture can provide service quality differentiation and furthermore, select good client behavior and discriminate against adversarial behavior. If confirmed by additional experiments, judicious partitioning of resources using different pricing functions can improve overall service survivability.