Tracing DDoS floods: An automated approach

We propose a Controller-Agent model that would greatly minimize distributed denial-of-servicfe (DDoS) attacks on the Internet. We introduce a new packet marking technique and agent design that enables us to identify the approximate source of attack (nearest router) with a single packet even in the case of attacks with spoofed source addresses. Our model is invoked only during attack times, and is able to process the victims traffic separately without disturbing other traffic, it is also able to establish different attack signatures for different attacking sources and can prevent the attack traffic at the nearest router to the attacking system. It is simple in its implementation, it has fast response for any changes in attack traffic pattern, and can be incrementally deployed. Hence we believe that the model proposed in this paper seems to be a promising approach to prevent distributed denial-of-service attacks.