Akamai Technologies, Inc.
USING THE STATE OF A REQUEST ROUTING MECHANISM TO INFORM ATTACK DETECTION AND MITIGATION

Abstract:

Among other things, this document describes systems, methods and apparatus for identifying and mitigating network attacks, particularly botnet attacks and other volumetric attacks. In some embodiments, a distributed computing platform provides client-facing service endpoints and a request routing mechanism (request router or RR) directing clients to a particular service endpoint or cluster thereof to obtain a service. The state of the RR at a given time is communicated to enforcement points in the system, which may be cluster equipment, service endpoints, or other components. When client traffic arrives at a particular enforcement point it is checked for consistency with the RR's directions, referred to as `mapping consistency`. This information is incorporated into decisions about how to handle the packets from the client.