Metasebia Kassa¹ and Mulugata Libsie², ¹ ZTE University Ethiopian Branch, Ethiopia and ²Addis Ababa University, Ethiopia

DDoS attack is a distributed source but coordinated Internet security threat that attackers either degrade or disrupt a shared service to legitimate users. It uses various methods to inflict damages on limited resources. It can be broadly classified as: flood and semantic (logic) attacks. DDoS attacking mechanisms vary from time to time and simple but powerful attacking tools are freely available on the Internet. There have been many trials on defending victims from DDoS attacks. However, many of the previous attack prevention systems lack effective handling of various attacking mechanisms and protecting legitimate users from collateral damages during detection and protection. In this paper, we proposed a distributed but synchronized DDoS defense architecture by using multiple agents, which are autonomous systems that perform their assigned mission in other networks on behalf of the victim. The major assignments of defense agents are IP spoofing verification, high traffic rate limitation, anomaly packet detection, and attack source detection. These tasks are distributed through four agents that are deployed on different domain networks. The proposed solution was tested through simulation with sample attack scenarios on the model Internet topology. The experiments showed encouraging results. A more comprehensive attack protection and legitimate users prevention from collateral damages makes this system more effective than other previous works.

Denial of Service, Distributed Attack, Synchronized defense, Attack Prevention, Agent