A Game-Theoretic Model for DDoS Mitigation Strategies with Cloud Services

As DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attacks constantly evolve and bombard businesses and organizations from time to time, DDoS mitigation cloud service is a popular solution to defend against DDoS attacks. Decision makers can select which services to deploy given the associated risk and the deployment cost. In this work, we establish a game-theoretic model to simulate the decision making of attackers and defenders under the context of DDoS attacks. We simulate the attacker/defender game under different scenarios and demonstrate that the efficacy of using external services is impacted by several factors including the resources of the organization, the potential damage and the attacker cost/reward. We find that under different scenarios, the Nash Equilibrium may vary drastically from no attack at all to definite attack. Our study can provide useful insights to decision makers and stakeholders on their DDoS defense strategy planning. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first game model to investigate the DDoS attack/defense strategy involving third-party services.