Jared Smith, a Ph.D. student in the UT Computer Security Lab (volsec.eecs.utk.edu) advised by Max Schuchard, presented a full paper at the 39th annual IEEE Symposium for Security and Privacy in San Francisco, CA. The paper, entitled “Routing around Congestion: Defeating DDoS Attacks and Adverse Networking Conditions with Reactive BGP Routing,” was one of 63 papers accepted out of 564 submitted (11% acceptance rate) at S&P, one of the top 4 academic security conferences.

At the conference, Jared and Schuchard presented the first deployable solution to a previously unmitigated form of Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS). This particular form of DDoS has been used in recent years to take entire countries offline, take down large parts of the Internet’s infrastructure, and prohibit millions of Internet users from communicating online. While most solutions to DDoS require cooperating with other networks or paying for expensive commercial solutions, their solution allows an online entity to defend against DDoS without these requirements, and in many cases make modern botnet-based attacks a problem of the past.

For more information on the paper and the UT Computer Security Lab in general, please visit volsec.eecs.utk.edu.