An adaptive method for source-end detection of pulsing DoS attacks

Abstract

The intermittent attacking behavior of pulsing denial of service (PDoS) attacks poses a real challenge to the existing DoS detection methods. In this paper, an adaptive method is presented to meet this challenge. Three features distinguish this method from others. (i) No assumption is made on the distribution of the traffic samples. (ii) Automatic adjustment of the detection threshold according to the traffic conditions. (iii) Timely detection of the end of a PDoS attack. Simulation results validate the efficacy of the proposed method in source-end detection of PDoS attacks. They show (i) the minimum malicious traffic that can be detected by the proposed method is about 20% of the background traffic, under the requirements for detection delays of the start and the end of a PDoS attack are within 3 observation periods; (ii) the proposed method is more sensitive to pulsing SYN flooding traffic than it is to pulsing UDP flooding traffic. © 2013 SERSC.