Microsoft Corporation
Dynamic rate limiting for mitigating distributed denial-of-service attacks

Abstract:

The disclosed embodiments provide a system for mitigating a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack. During operation, the system analyzes application layer data in historical traffic to an online system to determine a historical volume of member traffic from an Internet Protocol (IP) address to the online system, wherein the member traffic is generated by members of the online system. Next, the system calculates a rate limit for a set of requests from the IP address to the online system based on the historical volume of member traffic from the IP address. During a DDoS attack, the system outputs the rate limit for use in blocking a subset of the requests from the IP address to the online system.