Deployable overlay network for defense against distributed SYN flood attacks

Abstract

Distributed denial-of-service attacks on public servers have recently become more serious. To assure that network services will not be interrupted, we need faster and more accurate defense mechanisms against malicious traffic, especially SYN floods. But single point defense (ex. firewalls) lacks a scalability to catch up the increase of the attack traffic. In this paper, we introduce a distributed defense mechanism using overlay networks. This mechanism detects attacks near the victim servers and alert messages are sent via the overlay networks. Then defense nodes identify legitimate traffic and block malicious ones. The legitimate traffic is protected via the overlay networks. We simulate and verify our proposed method can effectively block malicious traffic and protect legitimate traffic. We also describe the deployment scenario of our defense mechanism.