Towards Defeating DDoS Attacks

Abstract

Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks are attacks where a host of compromised systems are used to target a single system. This single system can be either an actual machine or a network resource. What makes these attacks so prevalent and hard to deal with is the fact that they are distributed. They come from a wide variety of machines, making them hard to trace and even harder to counter. This, in conjunction with the fact that many tools are becoming available on the market that make DDoS attacks easier, makes preventing DDoS attacks a very imperative issue. This paper proposes a mechanism, DDDoS, or Triple Dos, which will deal with DDoS attacks on the Internet layer. There are registration and authentication protocols used to connect clients and servers, so that an unregistered client cannot access the network and thus flood it with traffic. The Triple Dos service will only be activated when a DDoS attack is detected (using clustering), and it will ensure that registered clients and servers can always communicate.