Detection of Distributed Denial of Service Flooding Attack Using Odds Ratio

Abstract

Computer networks are vulnerable to many types of attacks while the Distributed Denial of Service attack (DDoS) serves as one of the top concerns for security professionals. The DDoS flooding attack denies the services by consuming the server resources to prevent the legitimate users from using their desired services. The hardness of detecting this attack lies in sending a stream of packets to the server with spoofed IP addresses, so that the internet routing infrastructure cannot distinguish the spoofed packets. Based on the odds ratio (OR) statistical measurement, in this work we propose a new detection method for the DDoS flooding attacks. By exploring the odds ratio to determine the risk factor of any incoming traffic to the server, the legitimate and attack traffic packets can be easily differentiated. Experimental results demonstrate the efficiency of the presented detection method in terms of its detection probability and detection time.