Detection of smurf flooding attacks using Kullback-Leibler-based scheme

Reliable and timely detection of cyber attacks become indispensable to protect networks and systems. Internet control message protocol (ICMP) flood attacks are still one of the most challenging threats in both IPv4 and IPv6 networks. This paper proposed an approach based on Kullback-Leibler divergence (KLD) to detect ICMP-based Denial Of service (DOS) and Distributed Denial Of Service (DDOS) flooding attacks. This is motivated by the high capacity of KLD to quantitatively discriminate between two distributions. Here, the three-sigma rule is applied to the KLD distances for anomaly detection. We evaluated the effectiveness of this scheme by using the 1999 DARPA Intrusion Detection Evaluation Datasets.