An Adaptive Model for Detection and Prevention of DDoS and Flash Crowd Flooding Attacks

a serious nuisance for network security could be a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack. The advent of the technological era has also brought along the threat of DDoS attacks for a variety of services and applications that use the Internet. Firms can incur huge financial losses even if there is a disruption in services for a fraction of a period. Analogous to a DDoS attack is the Flash Crowd (FC), in which a particular service is assessed by many legitimate users concurrently, which results in the denial of service. Overloading of network resources is a common issue associated with both these events, which impact CPU, available bandwidth, and memory for legitimate users, thereby leading to limited accessibility. Many researchers have put effort to differentiate between these two kinds of traffic, but none could come up with an effective solution. In this study, we propose an adaptive agent-based model, known as an adaptive application layer flooding protection (AALFP) model, for DDoS and FC flooding attacks. The AALFP model is aimed to protect the network application layer (NAL) against such attacks. Importantly, the model distinguishes and separates normal from abnormal traffic, and then blocks illegitimate traffic. Note that, to operate two traffic filters, the agent relies on the following three parameters of normal traffic intensity, traffic attack behaviour, and IP address history log. An example scenario is provided to simulate the model's application.