Impact evaluation of distributed denial of service attacks using NS2

Abstract

Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks has been a prominent threat to the Internet community. The attack effect is recognized by large number of client base due to the dependency of majority users on World Wide Web. In such an attack, the attacker targets a machine or a server to thwart its services to the intended users. These attacks are majorly motivated by the presence of multiple groups of hackers present on the Internet. As the research has progressed in this field, researchers have encountered a lot many ways through which attacks have been successful launched. In early years of its birth, the Internet was not designed keeping in mind various possible security aspects thus it lacked this immunity in present day. This paper covers the advent of the DDoS attacks along-with their types. We have also designed certain simulation scenarios based on flooding based DDoS attacks to measure its impact on legitimate users. A discussion on the present solutions to combat such attack situations concludes our work.