Protection System against Overload and Distributed Denial of Service Attacks

Abstract

Detection of, and protection from overload and denial of service attacks is a common problem in information system servers. Such situation may be the result of simple overload, such as increased service request rate during peak hours, or a malicious distributed attack originating from many computers. This article describes a solution to this problem, focusing on protection mechanisms against both natural and malicious overload, based on analyzing the queue of requests - which, as described in this paper, is chosen to be unlimited. Furthermore, detection and protection scheme against blocking and crash-bug exploiting attacks is presented. The described algorithms were implemented within the dependability and security by enhanced reconfigurability (DESEREC) EU FP6 integrated project.