Open Access

ARTICLE

Cooperative Detection Method for DDoS Attacks Based on Blockchain

by Jieren Cheng^1,2, Xinzhi Yao^1,2,*, Hui Li³, Hao Lu⁴, Naixue Xiong⁵, Ping Luo^1,2, Le Liu^1,2, Hao Guo^1,2, Wen Feng^1,2

1 Hainan University, Haikou, 570228, China
2 Hainan Blockchain Technology Engineering Research Center, Haikou, 570228, China
3 Hainan Huochain Tech Company Limited, Haikou, 570100, China
4 Research Office of Information Technology, Air Force Early Warning Academy, Wuhan, 430019, China
5 Department of Mathematics and Computer Science, Northeastern State University, Tahlequah, 74464, USA

* Corresponding Author: Xinzhi Yao. Email:

Computer Systems Science and Engineering 2022, 43(1), 103-117. https://doi.org/10.32604/csse.2022.025668

Received 01 December 2021; Accepted 18 January 2022; Issue published 23 March 2022

Abstract

Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks is always one of the major problems for service providers. Using blockchain to detect DDoS attacks is one of the current popular methods. However, the problems of high time overhead and cost exist in the most of the blockchain methods for detecting DDoS attacks. This paper proposes a blockchain-based collaborative detection method for DDoS attacks. First, the trained DDoS attack detection model is encrypted by the Intel Software Guard Extensions (SGX), which provides high security for uploading the DDoS attack detection model to the blockchain. Secondly, the service provider uploads the encrypted model to Inter Planetary File System (IPFS) and then a corresponding Content-ID (CID) is generated by IPFS which greatly saves the cost of uploading encrypted models to the blockchain. In addition, due to the small amount of model data, the time cost of uploading the DDoS attack detection model is greatly reduced. Finally, through the blockchain and smart contracts, the CID is distributed to other service providers, who can use the CID to download the corresponding DDoS attack detection model from IPFS. Blockchain provides a decentralized, trusted and tamper-proof environment for service providers. Besides, smart contracts and IPFS greatly improve the distribution efficiency of the model, while the distribution of CID greatly improves the efficiency of the transmission on the blockchain. In this way, the purpose of collaborative detection can be achieved, and the time cost of transmission on blockchain and IPFS can be considerably saved. We designed a blockchain-based DDoS attack collaborative detection framework to improve the data transmission efficiency on the blockchain, and use IPFS to greatly reduce the cost of the distribution model. In the experiment, compared with most blockchain-based method for DDoS attack detection, the proposed model using blockchain distribution shows the advantages of low cost and latency. The remote authentication mechanism of Intel SGX provides high security and integrity, and ensures the availability of distributed models.

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Keywords

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