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Autonomic Response to Distributed Denial of Service Attacks. Paper by: Dan Sterne, Kelly Djahandari, Brett Wilson, Bill Babson, Dan Schnackenberg, Harley Holliday and Travis Reid Presented by: Jesus F. Morales. Overview. Introduction: the problem Proposed solution
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Autonomic Response to Distributed Denial of Service Attacks Paper by: Dan Sterne, Kelly Djahandari, Brett Wilson, Bill Babson, Dan Schnackenberg, Harley Holliday and Travis Reid Presented by: Jesus F. Morales
Overview • Introduction: the problem • Proposed solution • The experiment • Results • Observations • Conclusions
Introduction • The problem • Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks • Hacker toolkits • January 2001 • DDoS attack against websites hosting Hotmail, MSN, Expedia and other large services • Services inaccessible for 22 hours
Current state of response • Relies on expert, manual labor by network administrators • Response includes two main activities: • “Input debugging” • Find router’s physical interfaces used for the attack (statistics, network traffic probes) • Mitigation of network traffic flow • Packet filtering or rate limiting at the associated router • Contact upstream organizations
Current state of response: drawbacks • Requires immediate availability of highly skilled network administrators • Time consuming • Downtime & costs • It does not scale • What about attacks involving hundreds of networks? • “Whack a mole” attacks
Proposed solution • Intruder Detection and Isolation Protocol (IDIP) • Protocol for reporting intrusion-related events and coordinating attack tracebacks and automated response actions • Cooperative Intrusion Traceback and Response Architecture (CITRA) • The architecture based on IDIP • Authors have adapted CITRA and IDIP for DDoS attacks
Attack response • Policy mechanisms for each CITRA component along the attack path determine the adequate response • Block attacked service port on all requests from attacker’s address or network for a specified amount of time • At CITRA-enabled hosts • Kill offending process • Disable offending user’s account • Goal: use the narrowest network response • Stop the attack • Minimize impact on legitimate users • Reports with responses taken is sent to the Discovery Coordinator (DC) • Global view and system topology allows, hopefully, for the best community-wide response
Experiment: Autonomic response to DDoS • The problem • Sophisticated DDoS toolkits generate traffic that “blends in” with legitimate traffic • Cannot be blocked by router packet filters without blocking legitimate traffic • Traffic rate limiting may be more useful • Experiment goals • Prove that CITRA and IDIP can defend against DDoS attacks • In particular, against a Stacheldraht v4 attack
Experiment: Stacheldraht toolkit and test application • Stacheldraht toolkit • Can generate ICMP, UDP and TCP floods and Smurf attacks • Provides one or more master servers that control agents (flood sources) • Can target floods at arbitrary machines and ports • Test application • Audio/video streaming • RealNetworks’ RealSystem sever • RealPlayer client
Experiment: settings • Test data • 8-minute 11-seconds continuous motion video • Encoded at 200.1 Kbps • RealPlayet • Best quality video setting (10 Mbps bandwidth) • Data buffering: 5 seconds (the minimum) • Transport protocol: UDP • Attack • Target is the RealSystem server • UDP packets indistinguishable from control packets sent to the server from RealPlayer clients
Experiment: Stacheldraht flooding and autonomic rate limiting
Observations • Degraded recovery probably due to detector’s slow response speed (366 MHz Pentium II) • Independent experiment • Results confirmed • Full recovery obtained every time • Higher performance detector • CITRA’s response effective after 2 seconds vs. 10 – 12 seconds. • Results are preliminary • UDP allows traceback and mitigation request with one IP packet vs. TCP would require a three-way handshake first. May result in a slower propagation upstream
Conclusions • DDoS attacks an increasing threat to the Internet • Manual defense is inadequate • CITRA prototype for DDoS with rate limiting function seems to be a promising automatic response