Biblio

Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks aim to make a server unresponsive by flooding the target server with a large volume of packets (Volume based DDoS attacks), by keeping connections open for a long time and exhausting the resources (Low and Slow DDoS attacks) or by targeting protocols (Protocol based attacks). Volume based DDoS attacks that flood the target server with a large number of packets are easier to detect because of the abnormality in packet flow. Low and Slow DDoS attacks, however, make the server unavailable by keeping connections open for a long time, but send traffic similar to genuine traffic, making detection of such attacks difficult. This paper proposes a solution to detect and mitigate one such Low and slow DDoS attack, Slowloris in an SDN (Software Defined Networking) environment. The proposed solution involves communication between the detection and mitigation module and the controller of the Software Defined Network to get data to detect and mitigate low and slow DDoS attack.

Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attacks aim to cause downtime or a lack of responsiveness for web services. DDoS attacks targeting the application layer are amongst the hardest to catch as they generally appear legitimate at lower layers and attempt to take advantage of common application functionality or aspects of the HTTP protocol, rather than simply send large amounts of traffic like with volumetric flooding. Attacks can focus on functionality such as database operations, file retrieval, or just general backend code. In this paper, we examine common forms of application layer attacks, preventative and detection measures, and take a closer look specifically at HTTP Flooding attacks by the High Orbit Ion Cannon (HOIC) and “low and slow” attacks through slowloris.

As DDOS attacks interrupt internet services, DDOS tools confirm the effectiveness of the current attack. DDOS attack and countermeasures continue to increase in number and complexity. In this paper, we explore the scope of the DDoS flooding attack problem and attempts to combat it. A contemporary escalation of application layer distributed denial of service attacks on the web services has quickly transferred the focus of the research community from conventional network based denial of service. As a result, new genres of attacks were explored like HTTP GET Flood, HTTP POST Flood, Slowloris, R-U-Dead-Yet (RUDY), DNS etc. Also after a brief introduction to DDOS attacks, we discuss the characteristics of newly proposed application layer distributed denial of service attacks and embellish their impact on modern web services.