Distributed denial of service: Attack techniques and mitigation

Abstract

A Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack is an attempt to make a service unavailable by overwhelming the server with malicious traffic. DDoS attacks have become the most tedious and cumbersome issue in recent past. The number and magnitude of attacks have increased from few megabytes of data to 100s of terabytes of data these days. Due to the differences in the attack patterns or new types of attack, it is hard to detect these attacks effectively. In this paper, we devise new techniques for causing DDoS attacks and mitigation which are clearly shown to perform much better than the existing techniques. We also categorize DDoS attack techniques as well as the techniques used in their detection and thus attempt an extensive scoping of the DDoS problem. We also compare our attack module with a couple of tools available.