Development of State-of-Art Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) Attack Generation and Mitigation Tool

Abstract

Distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks have recently emerged as one of the most potent and prominent threats against information and service availability. Current research on DDoS attacks lacks realistic tools that can generate customized high-and low-rate DDoS attacks. Firewalls and routers can filter, block, and slow down attack traffic. For this reason, a thorough performance evaluation of existing DDoS attacks and countermeasures is still an open research problem. Under this project, we develop novel DDoS attack generation, detection and mitigation tools. The attack generation tool can be used to launch controlled attacks against certain hosts. A defense against DDoS attacks is most difficult due to the complexity and more number of computers involved. For attack detection, we first evaluate existing techniques. Based on this performance evaluation, we choose the best available technique or devise a new technique for DDoS attack detection. The selected DDoS detection technique is implemented and tested on a real network. A visualization tool has also been developed to monitor attack traffic.