Abstract
A novel class of extreme link-flooding DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attacks is designed to cut off entire geographical areas such as cities and even countries from the Internet by simultaneously targeting a selected set of network links. The Crossfire attack is a target-area link-flooding attack, which is orchestrated in three complex phases. The attack uses a massively distributed large-scale botnet to generate low-rate benign traffic aiming to congest selected network links, so-called target links. The adoption of benign traffic, while simultaneously targeting multiple network links, makes detecting the Crossfire attack a serious challenge. In this paper, we present analytical and emulated results showing hitherto unidentified vulnerabilities in the execution of the attack, such as a correlation between coordination of the botnet traffic and the quality of the attack, and a correlation between the attack distribution and detectability of the attack. Additionally, we identified a warm-up period due to the bot synchronization. For attack detection, we report results of using two supervised machine learning approaches: Support Vector Machine (SVM) and Random Forest (RF) for classification of network traffic to normal and abnormal traffic, i.e, attack traffic. These machine learning models have been trained in various scenarios using the link volume as the main feature set.
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Notes
- 1.
There are some technical settings that can be used to support the selection of the small parameters, such as, in a p2p platform (the most recent platform to synchronize botnets) peers usually contact each other in range of few minutes [11, 12], or Skype peers update only closer peers every 60 s [11].
- 2.
l1-norm is used only for illustration purpose to preserve the level of the link utilization at each experiment.
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Acknowledgment
This work is partially funded by the joint research programme UL/SnT-ILNAS on Digital Trust for Smart-ICT.
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Rezazad, M., Brust, M.R., Akbari, M., Bouvry, P., Cheung, NM. (2019). Detecting Target-Area Link-Flooding DDoS Attacks Using Traffic Analysis and Supervised Learning. In: Arai, K., Kapoor, S., Bhatia, R. (eds) Advances in Information and Communication Networks. FICC 2018. Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing, vol 887. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-03405-4_12
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