Distributed Active Filtering for Protecting Critical Servers

We propose an overlay filtering framework that enables protected servers to actively defend themselves and filter out specific attack flows as early as possible close to attack sources without collateral damages, different from current filtering approaches that provide passive protection at or close to destinations. This framework is designed to protect many distributed network applications that do not require pre-existing trust relationships, different from the previous overlay schemes designed for pre-authenticated known clients. We present the basic architecture and performance analysis in this paper.