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Traceback of DDoS attacks using entropy variations

journal contribution
posted on 2011-03-01, 00:00 authored by Shui Yu, Wanlei Zhou, Robin Ram Mohan DossRobin Ram Mohan Doss, W Jia
Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attacks are a critical threat to the Internet. However, the memoryless feature of the Internet routing mechanisms makes it extremely hard to trace back to the source of these attacks. As a result, there is no effective and efficient method to deal with this issue so far. In this paper, we propose a novel traceback method for DDoS attacks that is based on entropy variations between normal and DDoS attack traffic, which is fundamentally different from commonly used packet marking techniques. In comparison to the existing DDoS traceback methods, the proposed strategy possesses a number of advantagesit is memory nonintensive, efficiently scalable, robust against packet pollution, and independent of attack traffic patterns. The results of extensive experimental and simulation studies are presented to demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed method. Our experiments show that accurate traceback is possible within 20 seconds (approximately) in a large-scale attack network with thousands of zombies.

History

Journal

IEEE transactions on parallel and distributed systems

Volume

22

Issue

3

Pagination

412 - 425

Publisher

Piscataway, NJ

Location

United States

ISSN

1045-9219

eISSN

1558-2183

Language

eng

Publication classification

C1 Refereed article in a scholarly journal

Copyright notice

2011, IEEE