A collaborative defense mechanism against SYN flooding attacks in IP networks

Abstract

SYN flooding exploits the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) three-way handshake process by sending many connection requests using spoofed source IP addresses to a victim's host. This keeps that host from handling legitimate requests, causing it to populate its backlog queue with forged TCP connections. In this article, we propose a novel defense mechanism that makes use of the edge routers that are associated with the spoofed IP addresses' networks to determine whether the incoming SYN-ACK segment is valid. This is accomplished by maintaining a matching table of the outgoing SYNs and incoming SYN-ACKs and also by using the ARP protocol. If an incoming SYN-ACK segment is not valid, the edge router resets the connection at the victim's host, freeing up an entry in the victim's backlog queue, and enabling it to accept other legitimate incoming connection requests. We also present a communication protocol to encourage collaboration between various networks to protect each other. We evaluated the performance of our proposed approach and studied its impact on the network. Our experimental and simulation results showed the efficiency of our proposed collaborative defense mechanism. © 2008 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.