A Mechanism for Detection and Prevention of Distributed Denial of Service Attacks

Abstract

With several critical services being provided over the Internet it has become imperative to monitor the network traffic to prevent malicious attackers from depleting the resources of the network. In this paper, we propose a mechanism to protect a web-server against a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack. Incoming traffic to the server is continuously monitored to immediately detect any abnormal rise in the inbound traffic. This detection activates a traffic-filtering rule that pushes down the network traffic to an acceptable level by discarding packets according to measured relative traffic levels of each of the active sources. The proposed mechanism does not affect legitimate users and is thus more effective and robust. We have presented simulation results to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed mechanism.