Tracing Anonymous Mobile Attackers in Wireless Network

Abstract

In a flooding-based distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack, an adversary attempts to exhaust a target’s computing resource. To detect DDoS attacks in a network environment, IP traceback methods are deployed to determine the origin of attack packets. With the increase in bandwidth of wireless networks, attackers may choose this medium from which to launch attacks. However, tracing the attackers in wireless networks is more difficult since intermediate nodes may move or attackers may change their location to hide themselves. Thus, conventional traceback schemes for wired networks cannot apply directly to the wireless network infrastructure because the intermediate routers could be compromised by an adversary. Therefore, we propose a flexible and lightweight traceback scheme to determine the source of attack packets in a mobile ad-hoc environment. We will demonstrate our method’s ability to track the movement of an attacker and recognize attack traffic launched by the same attacker from different locations.