DDoS attacks and defense mechanisms: classification and state-of-the-art

Denial of Service (DoS) attacks constitute one of the major threats and among the hardest security problems in today's Internet. Of particular concern are Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks, whose impact can be proportionally severe. With little or no advance warning, a DDoS attack can easily exhaust the computing and communication resources of its victim within a short period of time. Because of the seriousness of the problem many defense mechanisms have been proposed to combat these attacks. This paper presents a structural approach to the DDoS problem by developing a classification of DDoS attacks and DDoS defense mechanisms. Furthermore, important features of each attack and defense system category are described and advantages and disadvantages of each proposed scheme are outlined. The goal of the paper is to place some order into the existing attack and defense mechanisms, so that a better understanding of DDoS attacks can be achieved and subsequently more efficient and effective algorithms, techniques and procedures to combat these attacks may be developed. (C) 2003 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.