Edinburgh Napier University

  Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks continuously pose a significant threat to online services by overwhelming them, rendering them unavailable to legitimate users. This underscores the need for more sophisticated techniques with robust detection and mitigation strategies, such as threat information sharing between organisations. Traditional techniques often fall short due to the lack of a collaborative defence mechanism between organisations. This highlights the need for effective DDoS detection and mitigation techniques that can efficiently share threat intelligence to enable a coordinated defence mechanism. This work addresses these issues by implementing a novel solution that combines rate limiting, time-window traffic analysis, blockchain, and incentive mechanism to detect and further mitigate DDoS attacks. Upon attack detection, the IP addresses of the attackers are captured and securely stored on a blockchain. An API endpoint is then created to share this information with other organisations. In return, participating companies can exchange NFT tokens or cryptocurrencies as a form of incentivised collaboration. The novelty of this research lies in advancing the concept of blockchain-based incentivisation to detect and mitigate DDoS attacks. The results demonstrate a successful outcome by leveraging blockchain technology to ensure integrity and transparency among participants for sharing threat information. The introduction of an incentive mechanism leads to more active participation from organisations, with the ultimate aim of creating a resilient and secure online ecosystem.