2 research outputs found
Adaptive Response System for Distributed Denial-of-Service Attacks
The continued prevalence and severe damaging effects of the Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS)
attacks in today’s Internet raise growing security concerns and call for an immediate response to come
up with better solutions to tackle DDoS attacks. The current DDoS prevention mechanisms are usually
inflexible and determined attackers with knowledge of these mechanisms, could work around them.
Most existing detection and response mechanisms are standalone systems which do not rely on
adaptive updates to mitigate attacks. As different responses vary in their “leniency” in treating
detected attack traffic, there is a need for an Adaptive Response System.
We designed and implemented our DDoS Adaptive ResponsE (DARE) System, which is a
distributed DDoS mitigation system capable of executing appropriate detection and mitigation
responses automatically and adaptively according to the attacks. It supports easy integrations for both
signature-based and anomaly-based detection modules. Additionally, the design of DARE’s individual
components takes into consideration the strengths and weaknesses of existing defence mechanisms,
and the characteristics and possible future mutations of DDoS attacks. These components consist of an
Enhanced TCP SYN Attack Detector and Bloom-based Filter, a DDoS Flooding Attack Detector and
Flow Identifier, and a Non Intrusive IP Traceback mechanism. The components work together
interactively to adapt the detections and responses in accordance to the attack types. Experiments
conducted on DARE show that the attack detection and mitigation are successfully completed within
seconds, with about 60% to 86% of the attack traffic being dropped, while availability for legitimate
and new legitimate requests is maintained. DARE is able to detect and trigger appropriate responses in
accordance to the attacks being launched with high accuracy, effectiveness and efficiency.
We also designed and implemented a Traffic Redirection Attack Protection System (TRAPS), a
stand-alone DDoS attack detection and mitigation system for IPv6 networks. In TRAPS, the victim
under attack verifies the authenticity of the source by performing virtual relocations to differentiate the
legitimate traffic from the attack traffic. TRAPS requires minimal deployment effort and does not
require modifications to the Internet infrastructure due to its incorporation of the Mobile IPv6
protocol. Experiments to test the feasibility of TRAPS were carried out in a testbed environment to
verify that it would work with the existing Mobile IPv6 implementation. It was observed that the
operations of each module were functioning correctly and TRAPS was able to successfully mitigate an
attack launched with spoofed source IP addresses