An effective mechanism to regenerate HTTP flooding DDoS attack using real time data set

Abstract

Application Layer Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks are very challenging to detect and mitigate. The various possible application layer attacks are HTTP flooding, XML attack, DNS attacks, etc. The most common and renowned application layer attack is HTTP flooding. The HTTP flooding detection and mitigation is an interesting research topic in computer networks. There are various research solutions proposed by validating against HTTP flooding; using tools such as Golden Eye, LOIC, proprietary tools, etc. HTTP flooding attacks generated using any existing tools may not exhibit similar characteristics of the real time HTTP flooding attack. The real time HTTP flooding attack data sets available in the internet, for example FIFA World Cup 1998 data set. The data sets are stored in processed log format due to security and confidential reasons. So, it cannot be directly used to regenerate real time attacks to test research solution. Also, there is no proper way or mechanism to regenerate attacks from data set log files. The proposed work gives a solution for regenerating HTTP flooding attack using WORLD CUP 1998 data set log files. The paper further augments detailed discussion, steps involved in conversion of the log files into HTTP requests, logging captures, performance analysis of the work and future enhancements.