Cisco ASR 9000 vDDoS Mitigation Overview
Distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks target network infrastructures or computer services resources. The primary goal of DDoS attacks is to deny legitimate users access to a particular computer or network resources, which results in service degradation, loss of reputation, and irretrievable data loss. DDoS Mitigation is the process of detecting increasingly complex and deceptive assaults and mitigating the effects of the attack to ensure business continuity and resource availability.
The Arbor Peakflow solution protects customer networks by mitigating undesirable traffic caused by DDoS attacks. It comprises a number of functions as well as a set of hardware devices that implement those functions. Peakflow SP means the control components such as monitoring the network, detecting attacks, and coordinating an attack response. Peakflow SP runs on SP appliances or in virtual machines. Peakflow Threat Management System (TMS) or Peakflow SP TMS is the data plane component to remove DDoS attacks.
Using Netflow and BGP, Arbour Peakflow solution monitors the network ingress points to build a base line for network behavior and traffic patterns. It will then perform ongoing monitoring to detect anomalies and flag them as potential attacks. These potential attacks are presented to network operations via a GUI, email, or SNMP which allows a range of actions to be taken, including initiating a response or marking an event as a false alarm. If there is an attack, the Arbor Peakflow solution redirects all traffic for the destination through the TMS which can remove unwanted traffic and clean the traffic as effectively as possible without blocking valid connections. The new path to the TMS where the traffic from the original path is diverted is called off-ramp traffic path. The path from the TMS egress interface to the original destination of the traffic where the clean traffic is sent is called on-ramp traffic path.
Cisco has partnered with Arbor Networks to deliver DDoS attack mitigation capabilities on Cisco ASR 9000 Series routers by integrating the Threat Management System (TMS) DDoS mitigation functionality to the Cisco ASR 9000 router. The TMS will be implemented on the ASR 9000 VSM (Virtualized Services Module) hosted in the ASR 9000 chassis.