Memcached: An Experimental Study of DDoS Attacks for the Wellbeing of IoT Applications

Abstract

Distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks are significant threats to the cyber world because of their potential to quickly bring down victims. Memcached vulnerabilities have been targeted by attackers using DDoS amplification attacks. GitHub and Arbor Networks were the victims of Memcached DDoS attacks with 1.3 Tbps and 1.8 Tbps attack strengths, respectively. The bandwidth amplification factor of nearly 50,000 makes Memcached the deadliest DDoS attack vector to date. In recent times, fellow researchers have made specific efforts to analyze and evaluate Memcached vulnerabilities; however, the solutions provided for security are based on best practices by users and service providers. This study is the first attempt at modifying the architecture of Memcached servers in the context of improving security against DDoS attacks. This study discusses the Memcached protocol, the vulnerabilities associated with it, the future challenges for different IoT applications associated with caches, and the solutions for detecting Memcached DDoS attacks. The proposed solution is a novel identification-pattern mechanism using a threshold scheme for detecting volume-based DDoS attacks. In the undertaken study, the solution acts as a pre-emptive measure for detecting DDoS attacks while maintaining low latency and high throughput.