Utilization of blockchain for mitigating the distributed denial of service attacks

Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks cause devastating effects on the web services and hence harm the digital availability. The DDoS attackers use vulnerabilities exposed through new networking technologies like wireless, mobile, IoT, and associated protocol weaknesses for bringing down the networks and servers. Owing to availability of easily available tools and botnet armies, the DDoS attack incidences in the internet world are increasing day by day. Several techniques have been proposed by the researchers against DDoS attacks. This paper concentrates on the utilization of one of the latest and most promising technologies, that is, blockchain technology against DDoS attacks. The blockchain technology is rapidly finding use in various applications ranging from financial to gaming; this is because of its stable, decentralized, and secure architecture. The DDoS solutions based on blockchain are still in infancy and some solutions provide only architectural details without bothering about the implementation details. This paper presents a study of the blockchain-based DDoS solutions. It also compares the existing blockchain-based techniques against DDoS attacks and analyses them. This paper facilitates the development of future research proposals in this emerging area of blockchain technology.