ColShield: an effective and collaborative protection shield for the detection and prevention of collaborative flooding of DDoS attacks in wireless mesh networks

I Diana Jeba Jingle,Elijah Blessing Rajsingh

doi:10.1186/s13673-014-0008-8

I Diana Jeba Jingle, Elijah Blessing Rajsingh

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.1186/s13673-014-0008-8

Copy DOI

Abstract

AbstractWireless mesh networks are highly susceptible to Distributed Denial-of-Service attacks due to its self-configuring property. Flooding DDOS attack is one form of collaborative attacks and the transport layer of such networks are extremely affected. In this paper we propose ColShield, an effective and collaborative protection shield which not only detects flooding attacks but also prevents the flooding attacks through clever spoof detection. ColShield consists of Intrusion Protection and Detection Systems (IPDS) located at various points in the network which collaboratively defend flooding attacks. ColShield detects the attack node and its specific port number under attack. In order to reduce the burden on a single global IPDS, the system uses several local IPDS for the collaborative mitigation of flooding attacks. The evaluation of ColShield is done using extensive simulations and is proved to be effective in terms of false positive ratio, packet delivery ratio, communication overhead and attack detection time.

Highlights

Wireless mesh networks (WMN) has a wired-cum-wireless semi-centralized infrastructure that allows an end host to join the network and communicate with any host by exchanging packets
This paper focuses on spoof-based collaborative detection of collaborative flooding DDoS attacks
This paper presents an effective intrusion protection and detection system (IPDS) that detects and prevents collaborative flooding attacks against clever spoofs at the mesh client level

Summary

Introduction

Wireless mesh networks (WMN) has a wired-cum-wireless semi-centralized infrastructure that allows an end host to join the network and communicate with any host by exchanging packets. WMN uses a high speed back-haul network that can transmit packets at high bandwidth in large range. WMN consists of gateways that optimize the network performance and integration with other wireless networks, intermediate mesh routers that are stationary and mesh clients that are mobile. The mesh routers must be synchronized [27] as it is the optimal feature of WMN. These mesh routers operate as bridging points in inter-network and can be integrated with other wireless devices. The mobility and self-configuring property of wireless mesh networks (WMN) makes the attackers to prevent the internet’s service to legitimate users by flooding excess amount of messages to the corresponding server thereby forming a Denial of Service (DoS) attack. The main objective of DoS attacks is either to completely tie up certain resources or to bring down an entire network so that the legitimate users are not able to access service(s)

Objectives

Findings

Conclusion