FRRED: Fourier robust RED algorithm to detect and mitigate LDoS attacks

Abstract

As most of consumer electronics are connected to the Internet, network attacks can cause massive damage and loss of data to the users. By sending periodic packet bursts to bottleneck routers, Low-Rate Denial-of-Service (LDoS) attacks can degrade the throughput of TCP applications while being hard to be detected. In this paper, we introduce Power Spectrum Density Entropy (PSD-entropy) to detect LDoS attacks. We also propose a Fourier transform based Robust RED (FRRED) queuing algorithm to preserve TCP throughput when faced with LDoS attacks. This novel Active Queue Management (AQM) Algorithm firstly detects the suspicious attack packets based on their arrival time and then filter the attack packets based on Power Spectrum Density (PSD) entropy. We perform extensive simulations in NS-3 to evaluate the performance of FRRED. Compared to other AQM algorithms, FRRED has the lowest False Positive Rate and can preserve nearly the full TCP throughput.