Domain-Driven Security’s take on Denial-of-Service (DoS) Attacks

Abstract: Many companies and organisations today suffer from Denial-of-Service (DoS) attacks, which can have direct and indirect economical consequences. This thesis tackles this problem with a novel approach by utilising domain specific behaviour and knowledge. The goal is to distinguish malicious attacks from legitimate usage and to alter overall system behaviour at the event of a DoS attack. Distributed DoS attacks (DDoS) are examined as well as a category suggested in this thesis, namely Domain DoS attacks. A simple e-commerce system is developed based on the principles of Domain-Driven Design in order to test the given approach. Five examples of DoS attacks are presented and tested towards the system. The results indicate that utilising domain behaviour is a suitable approach in order to mitigate DoS attacks, but it requires deep integration with the application itself.