Taxonomical approach to the deployment of traceback mechanisms

Abstract

The development of cyber society has fostered the emergence of e-commerce, which is active with business and private transactions. Nevertheless, it also emboldened malicious activities that damage users' profit in the society. Among these activities, Distributed Denial of Services (DDoS), which imposes an excessive workload on network entities such as hosts, is one of the most devastating form of attacks and can cause complete malfunctioning of cyber society's infrastructure. In order to counter DDoS and facilitate secure and reliable functioning of cyber societies, various types of traceback mechanisms have been proposed that trace the entire attack path or partial attack path of the attacks. In the future, networks will need to accommodate such traceback functionalities. This paper proposes a taxonomy of traceback mechanisms and describes their characteristics. It also discusses issues toward the deployment of the mechanisms over the Internet.