DDoS attacks and Countermeasures

Abstract

Internet has grown leaps and bounds over the last few decades. Internet's phenomenal growth it has attracted users with malicious intent. Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks have become very common these days. The amount of damage that DDoS attacks have inicted is enormous. DDoS attacks cannot be eliminated completely. The need of hour is to propose and build effective countermeasures that can detect, prevent and mitigate the eect of DDoS attacks.In this thesis, we will present a brief history of DDoS attacks, background survey of differnt types of DDoS attacks that attackers are employing, the DDoS tools that exist at attacker's disposal, the various DDoS countermeasures that have been proposed by researchers, DDoS countermeasures built currently for Cisco routers and how a laboratory environment can be setup to initiate and test DDoS attacks. We make an effort to critically evaluate the various countermeasures based on important characteristics and discuss different vulnerabilities and shortcomings in the existing solutions. Our critical evaluation is to provide an insight into the drawbacks of existing proposals, so that the new countermeasures being proposed can factor in the existing shortcomings. Since the major challenge in evaluating the various DDoS countermeasures is to compare them on a common platform, We have created a simple test bed setup in the laboratory that can be easily extended for future work.