Defending against Distributed Denial of Service

Abstract

Recently the notorious Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks made people aware of the importance of providing available data and services securely to users. A DDoS attack is characterized by an explicit attempt from an attacker to prevent legitimate users of a service from using the desired resource (CERT, 2006). For example, in February 2000, many Web sites such as Yahoo, Amazon.com, eBuy, CNN.com, Buy. com, ZDNet, E*Trade, and Excite.com were all subject to total or regional outages by DDoS attacks. In 2002, a massive DDoS attack briefly interrupted Web traffic on nine of the 13 DNS “root” servers that control the Internet (Naraine, 2002). In 2004, a number of DDoS attacks assaulted the credit card processor Authorize. net, the Web infrastructure provider Akamai Systems, the interactive advertising company DoubleClick (left that company’s servers temporarily unable to deliver ads to thousands of popular Web sites), and many online gambling sites (Arnfield, 2004). Nowadays, Internet applications face serious security problems caused by DDoS attacks. For example, according to CERT/CC Statistics 1998-2005 (CERT, 2006), computer-based vulnerabilities reported have increased exponentially since 1998. Effective approaches to defeat DDoS attacks are desperately demanded (Cisco, 2001; Gibson, 2002).