Lessons for Autonomic Services from the Design of an Anonymous DoS Protection Overlay

In this paper we report on the design and implementation of a Denial of Service protection overlay, and draw lessons for autonomous services. Our approach is novel in that each node is only aware of a subset of the other nodes within the overlay; the routing topology of the overlay is hidden from internal and external nodes and the overlay uses a distributed monitoring and trust system to detect misbehaving nodes. In meeting these design goals, we have had to move beyond the normal approaches to designing self-configuring and self-monitoring services, and we highlight these issues as being important for the design of future multi-organisation systems.