Fingerprinting Internet DNS Amplification DDoS Activities

This work proposes a novel approach to infer and characterize Internet-scale DNS amplification DDoS attacks by leveraging the darknet space. Complementary to the pioneer work on inferring Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) activities using darknet, this work shows that we can extract DDoS activities without relying on backscattered analysis. The aim of this work is to extract cyber security intelligence related to DNS Amplification DDoS activities such as detection period, attack duration, intensity, packet size, rate and geo-location in addition to various network-layer and flow-based insights. To achieve this task, the proposed approach exploits certain DDoS parameters to detect the attacks. We empirically evaluate the proposed approach using 720 GB of real darknet data collected from a /13 address space during a recent three months period. Our analysis reveals that the approach was successful in inferring significant DNS amplification DDoS activities including the recent prominent attack that targeted one of the largest anti-spam organizations. Moreover, the analysis disclosed the mechanism of such DNS amplification DDoS attacks. Further, the results uncover high-speed and stealthy attempts that were never previously documented. The case study of the largest DDoS attack in history lead to a better understanding of the nature and scale of this threat and can generate inferences that could contribute in detecting, preventing, assessing, mitigating and even attributing of DNS amplification DDoS activities.Comment: 5 pages, 2 figure

Application of PSVR-DNS Algorithm for Attacker Detection and Isolation

The DNS (Domain Name System) is used to map and convert human-friendly domain names to the numeric IP (Internet Protocol) addresses. As with the operation of any communication system, there are some security risks associated with the operation of DNS. Actions targeting the availability or stability of a network\u27s DNS service are considered DNS attack. For example, a high volume of traffic and a large number of requests coming to DNS servers are part of a type of DoS (Denial of Service) attack that uses DNS for amplification. Although most DNS servers are open source, some commercial protective DNS services are available for network traffic control, filtering and automatic blocking of requests to undesirable, dangerous or malicious internet domains, but the price of such services is high. In this paper, a new PSVR-DNS (Probability Support Vector Regression-Domain Name System) algorithm is proposed for the purpose of detecting and isolating attackers who pose a threat to an uninterrupted work of the DNS servers. The main focus is on the prevention of the DNS cache poisoning. The collected results showed that the proposed PSVR-DNS algorithm achieves better performance related to faster detection and isolation of attacks compared to some existing algorithms

Investigation of open resolvers in DNS reflection DDoS attacks

Les serveurs du système de noms de domaine (DNS) représentent des éléments clés des réseaux Internet. Récemment, les attaquants ont profité de ce service pour lancer des attaques massives de déni de service distribué (DDoS) contre de nombreuses organisations [1, 2, 3]. Ceci est rendu possible grâce aux différentes vulnérabilités liées à la conception, implantation ou une mauvaise configuration du protocole DNS. Les attaques DDoS amplifiées par DNS sont des menaces dangereuses pour les utilisateurs d’Internet. L’objectif de cette étude est d’acquérir une meilleure compréhension des attaques DDoS amplifiées par DNS par l’investigation des résolveurs DNS ouverts à travers le monde. Dans ce contexte, il est nécessaire d’adopter une approche en phase précoce pour détecter les résolveurs DNS ouverts. Cela devient cruciale dans le processus d’enquête. Dans cette thèse, nous nous intéresserons à l’utilisation de résolveurs DNS ouverts dans les attaques DDoS amplifiées par DNS. Plus précisément, la principale contribution de notre recherche est la suivante : (i) Nous profilons les résolveurs DNS ouverts, ce qui implique : détecter les résolveurs ouverts, les localiser, détecter leur système d’exploitation et le type de leur connectivité, et étudier le but de leur vivacité. (ii) Nous effectuons une évaluation de la sécurité des résolveurs DNS ouverts et leurs vulnérabilités. De plus, nous discutons les fonctions de sécurité des résolveurs DNS, qui fournissent, par inadvertence, les attaquants par la capacité d’effectuer des attaques DDoS amplifiées par DNS. (iii) Nous présentons une analyse pour démontrer l’association des résolveurs DNS ouverts avec les menaces de logiciels malveillants.Domain Name System (DNS) servers represent key components of Internet networks. Recently, attackers have taken advantage of this service to launch massive Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks against numerous organizations [1, 2, 3]. This is made possible due to the various vulnerabilities linked to the design, implementation or misconfiguration of the DNS protocol. DNS reflection DDoS attacks are harmful threats for internet users. The goal of this study is to gain a better understanding of DNS reflection DDoS attacks through the investigation of DNS open resolvers around the world. In this context, there is a need for an early phase approach to detect and fingerprint DNS open resolvers. This becomes crucial in the process of investigation. In this thesis, we elaborate on the usage of DNS open resolvers in DNS reflection DDoS attacks. More precisely, the main contribution of our research is as follows : (i) We profile DNS open resolvers, which involves : detecting open resolvers, locating them, fingerprinting their operating system, fingerprinting the type of their connectivity, studying the purpose of their liveness. (ii) We conduct an assessment with respect to DNS open resolvers security and their vulnerabilities. Moreover, we discuss the security features that DNS open resolvers are equipped with, which inadvertently provide the capability to the attackers in order to carry out DNS reflection DDoS attacks. (iii) We present an analysis to demonstrate the association of DNS open resolvers with malware threats

Development of protection mechanisms against DRDoS-attacks and combined DRDoS-attacks

Distributed “denial of service” attacks based on the traffic reflection and amplification (DRDoS attacks) still are a powerful threat for computer networks. More than half of all attacks were executed by using multiple types of attacks. Development of new protection mechanisms against such attacks is one of the most important tasks in the field of computer security. In this paper, we present experiments on DNS attack, NTP attacks and combined DRDoS-attack simulation. We simulated several protection mechanisms as well as a mechanism developed by us. We compared these protection mechanisms for different kinds of attacks