Research on Distributed Denial-of-service Attacks: a Survey

Distributed denial-of-service attack (DDoS) brings a very serious threat to the stability of the Internet. In a typical DDoS attack, a large number of compromised hosts are amassed to send useless packets to jam the CPU or Internet connection of victim. In the last two years, it is discovered that DDoS attack methods and tools are becoming more sophisticated, effective, and also more difficult to trace to the real attackers. On the defense side, current technologies are still unable to withstand large-scale attacks. In this paper, we first describe various DDoS attack methods, and then present a discussion and review of current defense mechanisms such as IP traceback. Then we emphasis discuss a long-term solution, the Internet firewall approach, that attempts to intercept attack packets in the Internet core, well before reaching the victim.