Main Article Content
Abstract
Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attacks are a critical threat to the Internet. However, the memoryless feature of the Internet routing mechanisms makes it extremely hard to trace back to the source of these attacks. As a result, there is no effective and efficient method to deal with this issue so far. In this paper, we propose a novel trace back method for DDoS attacks that is based on entropy variations between normal and DDoS attack traffic, which is fundamentally different from commonly used packet marking techniques. In comparison to the existing DDoS trace back methods, the proposed strategy possesses a number of advantages it is memory non-intensive, efficiently scalable, robust against packet pollution, and independent of attack traffic patterns. The results of extensive experimental and simulation studies are presented to demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed method. Our experiments show that accurate trace back is possible within 20 seconds (approximately) in a largescale attack network with thousands of zombies.