ReAct: Reflection Attack Mitigation For Asymmetric Routing

Fuente: arXiv
Gespeichert in:
Bibliographische Detailangaben
Hauptverfasser: Hay, David, Hogan, Mary, Feibish, Shir Landau
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2026
Schlagworte:
Online-Zugang:
Tags: Tag hinzufügen
Keine Tags, Fügen Sie den ersten Tag hinzu!
_version_ 1866915719942242304
author Hay, David
Hogan, Mary
Feibish, Shir Landau
author_facet Hay, David
Hogan, Mary
Feibish, Shir Landau
contents Amplification Reflection Distributed Denial-of-Service (AR-DDoS) attacks remain a formidable threat, exploiting stateless protocols to flood victims with illegitimate traffic. Recent advances have enabled data-plane defenses against such attacks, but existing solutions typically assume symmetric routing and are limited to a single switch. These assumptions fail in modern networks where asymmetry is common, resulting in dropped legitimate responses and persistent connectivity issues. This paper presents ReAct, an in-network defense for AR-DDoS that is robust to asymmetry. ReAct performs request-response correlation across switches using programmable data planes and a sliding-window of Bloom filters. To handle asymmetric traffic, ReAct introduces a data-plane-based request forwarding mechanism, enabling switches to validate responses even when paths differ. ReAct can automatically adapt to routing changes with minimal intervention, ensuring continued protection even in dynamic network environments. We implemented ReAct on both a P4 interpreter and NVIDIAs Bluefield-3, demonstrating its applicability across multiple platforms. Evaluation results show that ReAct filters nearly all attack traffic without dropping legitimate responses-even under high-volume attacks and asymmetry. Compared to state-of-the-art approaches, ReAct achieves significantly lower false positives. To our knowledge, ReAct is the first data-plane AR-DDoS defense that supports dynamic, cross-switch collaboration, making it uniquely suitable for deployment in networks with asymmetry.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2601_06367
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle ReAct: Reflection Attack Mitigation For Asymmetric Routing
Hay, David
Hogan, Mary
Feibish, Shir Landau
Networking and Internet Architecture
Amplification Reflection Distributed Denial-of-Service (AR-DDoS) attacks remain a formidable threat, exploiting stateless protocols to flood victims with illegitimate traffic. Recent advances have enabled data-plane defenses against such attacks, but existing solutions typically assume symmetric routing and are limited to a single switch. These assumptions fail in modern networks where asymmetry is common, resulting in dropped legitimate responses and persistent connectivity issues. This paper presents ReAct, an in-network defense for AR-DDoS that is robust to asymmetry. ReAct performs request-response correlation across switches using programmable data planes and a sliding-window of Bloom filters. To handle asymmetric traffic, ReAct introduces a data-plane-based request forwarding mechanism, enabling switches to validate responses even when paths differ. ReAct can automatically adapt to routing changes with minimal intervention, ensuring continued protection even in dynamic network environments. We implemented ReAct on both a P4 interpreter and NVIDIAs Bluefield-3, demonstrating its applicability across multiple platforms. Evaluation results show that ReAct filters nearly all attack traffic without dropping legitimate responses-even under high-volume attacks and asymmetry. Compared to state-of-the-art approaches, ReAct achieves significantly lower false positives. To our knowledge, ReAct is the first data-plane AR-DDoS defense that supports dynamic, cross-switch collaboration, making it uniquely suitable for deployment in networks with asymmetry.
title ReAct: Reflection Attack Mitigation For Asymmetric Routing
topic Networking and Internet Architecture
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.06367