Defeating reflector based Denial-of-Service attacks using single packet filters

Abstract

Denial-of-Service (DoS) and Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attacks are becoming increasingly sophisticated with few practical solutions available. In this paper we consider the issue of filtering reflector based DoS attacks and of identifying attackers. For reflector based attacks, a Signature Conflict Triggered Filtering (SCTF) scheme based on Deterministic Edge Router Marking (DERM) was proposed. We suggest an enhancement to make the 3-way handshake in SCTF stateless and call it Fast-SCTF. We then propose a framework using BGP for a single-packet handshake. We demonstrate that our proposed scheme is space efficient, more secure, robust and it requires very little cooperation among autonomous systems.