Christoph Dietzel
DE-CIX Management GmbH, Frankfurt am Main
09 February 2023, 04:15 pm
“DDoS Mitigation at Scale – A Research to Product Journey”
hybride venue:
Rundeturmstraße 10, 64283 Darmstadt (S3|20); 1st floor; room 111
and online via Zoom
Abstract:
The Internet is omnipresent in our everyday routines – ranging from private affairs to business-critical operations. While the Internet evolved based on a scalable and flexible architecture, it was not designed with today’s high security requirements in mind. Even short disruptions or degradation of services can have a negative impact. Critical interconnection providers, i.e., Internet eXchange Points (IXPs) and Internet Service Providers (ISPs), manage multiple thousands of interconnections and end-customers, which translates into a significant share of the global Internet traffic. Modern network attacks, including Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS), are continuously increasing in terms of bandwidth and damage, have a devastating impact on their targets, and also put the underlying infrastructure under stress.
In this talk, we shed light on the story of a mitigation technique and its research fueled journey to a new and powerful commercial service, and discuss why technical superiority is not the only ingredient for adoption in the Internet. To this end, we present a line of research results from the past years, where we quantify the usage and shortcomings of blackholing, elaborate on a solution to overcome these together with a system design, and show how we did improve detection. Finally, we explain the practical challenges to implement a new service at the largest IXP in the world, and foster adoption in the industry.
Bio:
Christoph Dietzel is Global Head of Products & Research at DE-CIX, responsible for the innovation teams including Product Management, Research & Development, and Project Management. Chris is also affiliated with the Max Planck Institute for Informatics to combine practical IXP and computer network innovation with academic research. This challenging substrate of teams and tasks has one common thread: He is driving the technological and product future of the DE-CIX interconnection ecosystem, and thus, a part of “the” Internet. Prior to his current position, he was Head of R&D at DE-CIX and responsible for several research initiatives, including numerous projects funded by the public sector. Alongside his duties at DE-CIX, Chris earned a doctoral degree (Ph.D.) from the Technische Universität Berlin in Computer Science supervised by Anja Feldmann with a focus on Internet measurements/security, routing, and new networking technologies.
