The role of Blockchain in DDoS attacks mitigation: techniques, open challenges and future directions

With the proliferation of new technologies such as Internet of Things (IOT) and Software-Defined Networking(SDN) in the recent years, the distributed denial of service (DDoS)attack vector has broadened and opened new opportunities for more sophisticated DDoS attacks on the targeted victims. The new attack vector includes unsecured and vulnerable IoT devices connected to the internet, denial of service vulnerabilities like southbound channel saturation in the SDN architecture. Given the high-volume and pervasive nature of these attacks, it is beneficial for stakeholders to collaborate in detecting and mitigating the denial of service attacks in a timely manner. The blockchain technology is considered to improve the security aspects owing to the decentralized design, secured distributed storage and privacy. A thorough exploration and classification of blockchain techniques used for DDoS attack mitigation is not explored in the prior art. This paper reviews and categorizes the existed state-of-the-art DDoS mitigation solutions based on blockchain technology. The DDoS mitigation techniques are classified based on the solution deployment location i.e. network based, near attacker location, near victim location and hybrid solutions in the network architecture with emphasis on the IoT and SDN architectures. Additionally, based on our study, the research challenges and future directions to implement the blockchain based DDoS mitigation solutions are discussed. We believe that this paper could serve as a starting point and reference resource for future researchers working on denial of service attacks detection and mitigation using blockchain technology.