On the Benefits of Keeping Path Identifiers Secret in Future Internet: A DDoS Perspective

In recent years, there are increasing interests in using path identifiers (PIDs) as inter-domain routing objects in the future Internet. While PIDs are advertised throughout the Internet in some future Internet architectures, they are kept secret in others. In this paper, we investigate the benefits, from the perspective of preventing distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks, of keeping PIDs secret in future Internet when compared with advertising them throughout the Internet. Our results from extensive simulations show that keeping PIDs secret significantly helps prevent DDoS attacks.