An Approach for Mitigating Denial of Service Attack

Abstract

Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks are the most common types of cyber-attack on the internet and are rapidly increasing. Denial of service/distributed denial of service attack is an explicit attempt to make a machine or a network resource unavailable to its intended users. Attackers interrupt/suspend services of the host connected to internet temporarily or indefinitely.It involves saturating the target machine with external communication requests such that it cannot either respond to legitimate traffic or responds so slowly as to be rendered effectively unavailable. Two general form of Dos attacks are - those attacks that crashes services (computer attack) and those that flood services (network attack). Flooding DDoS attacks produce adverse effects for critical infrastructure availability, integrity and confidentiality. Current defense approaches cannot efficiently detect and filter out the attack traffic in real time. Based on the assumption that the attacker flows are very aggressive than the legitimate users the proposed work provides sufficient bandwidth to genuine users during flooding DDoS attack.The aim of the project is to implement an approach for mitigating DDoS based on “The Interface Based Rate Limiting (IBRL) algorithm”, used to mitigate the identified DDoS attacks. The implementation is carried out on a simulation tool Omnett++ installed on linux machine. The results are the plots that show that there is considerable increase in the two important and significant measures, response time and packet drop metrics for legitimate users even under DoS and DDoS attacks.