Theil-Based Countermeasure against Interest Flooding Attacks for Named Data Networks

NDN has been widely regarded as a promising representation and implementation of information- centric networking (ICN) and serves as a potential candidate for the future Internet architecture. However, the security of NDN is threatened by a significant safety hazard known as an IFA, which is an evolution of DoS and distributed DoS attacks on IP-based networks. The IFA attackers can create numerous malicious interest packets into a named data network to quickly exhaust the bandwidth of communication channels and cache capacity of NDN routers, thereby seriously affecting the routers' ability to receive and forward packets for normal users. Accurate detection of the IFAs is the most critical issue in the design of a countermeasure. To the best of our knowledge, the existing IFA countermeasures still have limitations in terms of detection accuracy, especially for rapidly volatile attacks. This article proposes a TC to detect the distributions of normal and malicious interest packets in the NDN routers to further identify the IFA. The trace back method is used to prevent further attempts. The simulation results show the efficiency of the TC for mitigating the IFAs and its advantages over other typical IFA countermeasures.