Honeypots for distributed denial-of-service attacks

Abstract

Distributed denial-of-service attacks are still a big threat to the Internet. Several proposals for coping with the attacks have been made, but none are successful by themselves. In this paper, we present a system that helps to defend a network from DDoS attacks. In addition to state of the art active and passive security defences, we propose a honeypot for such attacks. The goal is to simulate convincingly success of the compromise of a system to a potential DDoS attacker. Thereby, we can implement lessons learned by the honeypot in other systems to strengthen them against such attacks. On the other hand, we protect the rest of our network infrastructure from the impact of such an attack.