Academic literature on the topic 'Flooding attack'

This diploma thesis deals with the design and implementation of a tool for network attack detection from a captured network communication. It utilises the tshark packet analyser, the meaning of which is to convert the input file with the captured communications to the PDML format. The objective of this conversion being, increasing the flexibility of input data processing. When designing the tool, emphasis has been placed on the ability to expand it to detect new network attacks and on integrating these additions with ease. For this reason, the thesis also includes the design of a complex declarative descriptions for network attacks in the YAML serialization format. This allows us to specify the key properties of the network attacks and the conditions for their detection. The resulting tool acts as an interpreter of proposed declarative descriptions allowing it to be expanded with new types of attacks.

L'un des défis majeurs du monde de ces dernières décennies a été l'augmentation continue de la population des personnes âgées dans les pays développés. D’où la nécessité de fournir des soins de qualité à une population en croissance rapide, tout en réduisant les coûts des soins de santé. Dans ce contexte, de nombreux travaux de recherche portent sur l’utilisation des réseaux de capteurs sans fil dans les systèmes WBAN (Wireless Body Area Network), pour faciliter et améliorer la qualité du soin et de surveillance médicale à distance. Ces réseaux WBAN soulèvent de nouveaux défis technologiques en termes de sécurité et de protection contre les anomalies et les attaques. Le mode de communication sans fil utilisé entre ces capteurs et l’unité de traitement accentue ces vulnérabilités. En effet les vulnérabilités dans un système WBAN se décomposent en deux parties principales. La première partie se compose des attaques possibles sur le réseau des capteurs médicaux et sur le médium de communications sans fils entre ces capteurs et l’unité de traitement. La deuxième partie se compose des attaques possibles sur les communications à haut débit entre le système WBAN et le serveur médical. L’objectif de cette thèse est de répondre en partie aux problèmes de détection des attaques dans un système WBAN de surveillance médicale à distance. Pour atteindre cet objectif, nous avons proposé un algorithme pour détecter les attaques de brouillage radio (jamming attack) qui visent le médium de communications sans fils entre les capteurs et l’unité de traitement. Ainsi nous avons proposé une méthode de mesure de divergence pour détecter les attaques de type flooding qui visent les communications à haut débit entre le système WBAN et le serveur médical<br>One of the major challenges of the world in recent decades is the continued increase in the elderly population in developed countries. Hence the need to provide quality care to a rapidly growing population while reducing the costs of health care is becoming a strategic challenge. In this context, many researches focus on the use of wireless sensor networks in WBAN (Wireless Body Area Network) systems to facilitate and improve the quality of medical care and remote monitoring. These WBAN systems pose new technological challenges in terms of security and protection against faults and attacks. The wireless communication mode used between the sensors and the collection node accentuates these vulnerabilities. Indeed vulnerabilities in a WBAN system are divided into two main parts. The first part consists of the possible attacks on the network of medical sensors and on the wireless communications medium between the sensors and the processing unit. The second part consists of possible attacks on high-speed communications between the WBAN system and the medical server. The objective of this thesis is to meet some of the problems of detecting attacks in a WBAN system for remote medical monitoring. To achieve this goal, we propose an algorithm to detect the jamming attacks targeting the wireless communications medium between the sensors and the processing unit. In addition we propose a method of measuring divergence to detect the flooding attacks targeting the high-speed communications between the WBAN system and the medical server

Link-flooding attacks in which an adversary coordinates botnet messages to exhaust the bandwidth of selected network links in the core of the Internet (e.g., Tier-1 or Tier-2 networks) have been a powerful means of denial of service. In the past few years, these attacks have moved from the realm of academic curiosities to real-world incidents. Unfortunately, we have had a limited understanding of this type of attacks and effective countermeasures in the current Internet. In this dissertation, we address this gap in our understanding of link-flooding attacks and propose a two-tier defense approach. We begin by identifying routing bottlenecks as the major cause of the Internet vulnerability to link-flooding attacks. A routing bottleneck is a small set of links whose congestion disrupts the majority of routes taken towards a given set of destination hosts. These bottlenecks appear despite physicalpath diversity and sufficient bandwidth provisioning in normal (i.e., nonattack) mode of operation, and are an undesirable artifact of the current Internet design. We illustrate their pervasiveness for adversary-chosen sets of hosts in various cities and countries around the world via experimental measurements. We then present a real-time adaptive attack for persistent flooding of chosen links in the discovered routing bottlenecks using attack flows that are indistinguishable from legitimate traffic. We demonstrate the feasibility of these strategies and show that disruptions can scale from targeted hosts of a single organization to those of a country. To counter the link-flooding attacks defined in this dissertation, one could remove their root cause, namely the routing bottlenecks. However, this would affect the cost-minimizing policy that underlies the current Internet, change its routing architecture, and possibly affect communication costs. Instead, we propose an attack-deterrence mechanism that represents a first line of defense against link-flooding attacks by cost-sensitive adversaries. In the proposed defense, most link-flooding attacks are handled by the low-cost, single-domain based mechanism. As a second line of defense, which targets cost-insensitive adversaries that are undeterred, we propose the use of a multi-domain coordinated defense mechanism that is harder to orchestrate in the current Internet.

Thesis (Ph.D.) -- University of Maryland, College Park, 2009.<br>Thesis research directed by: Dept. of Electrical and Computer Engineering. Title from t.p. of PDF. Includes bibliographical references. Published by UMI Dissertation Services, Ann Arbor, Mich. Also available in paper.

The power grid has changed a great deal from what has been generally viewed as a traditional power grid. The modernization of the power grid has seen an increase in the integration and incorporation of computing and communication elements, creating an interdependence of both physical and cyber assets of the power grid. The fast-increasing connectivity has transformed the grid from what used to be primarily a physical system into a Cyber- Physical System (CPS). The physical elements within a power grid are well understood by power engineers; however, the newly deployed cyber aspects are new to most researchers and operators in this field. The new computing and communications structure brings new vulnerabilities along with all the benefits it provides. Cyber security of the power grid is critical due to the potential impact it can make on the community or society that relies on the critical infrastructure. These vulnerabilities have already been exploited in the attack on the Ukrainian power grid, a highly sophisticated, multi-layered attack which caused large power outages for numerous customers. There is an urgent need to understand the cyber aspects of the modernized power grid and take the necessary precautions such that the security of the CPS can be better achieved. The power grid is dependent on two main cyber infrastructures, i.e., Supervisory Control And Data Acquisition (SCADA) and Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI). This thesis investigates the AMI in power grids by developing a testbed environment that can be created and used to better understand and develop security strategies to remove the vulnerabilities that exist within it. The testbed is to be used to conduct and implement security strategies, i.e., an Intrusion Detections Systems (IDS), creating an emulated environment to best resemble the environment of the AMI system. A DoS flooding attack and an IDS are implemented on the emulated testbed to show the effectiveness and validate the performance of the emulated testbed.<br>M.S.<br>The power grid is becoming more digitized and is utilizing information and communication technologies more, hence the smart grid. New systems are developed and utilized in the modernized power grid that directly relies on new communication networks. The power grid is becoming more efficient and more effective due to these developments, however, there are some considerations to be made as for the security of the power grid. An important expectation of the power grid is the reliability of power delivery to its customers. New information and communication technology integration brings rise to new cyber vulnerabilities that can inhibit the functionality of the power grid. A coordinated cyber-attack was conducted against the Ukrainian power grid in 2015 that targeted the cyber vulnerabilities of the system. The attackers made sure that the grid operators were unable to observe their system being attacked via Denial of Service attacks. Smart meters are the digitized equivalent of a traditional energy meter, it wirelessly communicates with the grid operators. An increase in deployment of these smart meters makes it such that we are more dependent on them and hence creating a new vulnerability for an attack. The smart meter integration into the power grid needs to be studied and carefully considered for the prevention of attacks. A testbed is created using devices that emulate the smart meters and a network is established between the devices. The network was attacked with a Denial of Service attack to validate the testbed performance, and an Intrusion detection method was developed and applied onto the testbed to prove that the testbed created can be used to study and develop methods to cover the vulnerabilities present.

Ce travail illustre comment les tendances actuelles d'utilisation dominantes sur Internet motivent la recherche sur des architectures futures de réseau plus orientées vers le contenu. Parmi les architectures émergentes pour l'Internet du futur, le paradigme du Information-Centric Networking (ICN) est présenté. ICN vise à redéfinir les protocoles de base d'Internet afin d'y introduire un changement sémantique des hôtes vers les contenus. Parmi les architectures ICN, le Named-Data Networking (NDN) prévoit que les demandes nommées de contenus des utilisateurs soient transmises par leur nom dans les routeurs le long du chemin d'un consommateur à une ou plusieurs sources de contenus. Ces demandes de contenus laissent des traces dans les routeurs traversés qui sont ensuite suivis par les paquets de contenus demandés. La table d'intérêt en attente (PIT) est le composant du plan de données de l'NDN qui enregistre temporairement les demandes de contenus acheminés dans les routeurs. D'une part, ce travail explique que le mécanisme d'acheminement à états de la PIT permet des propriétés comme l'agrégation de requêtes, le multicast de réponses et le contrôle natif de flux hop-by-hop. D'autre part, ce travail illustre comment l'acheminement à états de la PIT peut facilement être mal utilisé par des attaquants pour monter des attaques de déni de service distribué (DDoS) disruptives, appelées Interest Flooding Attacks (IFAs). Dans les IFAs, des botnets vaguement coordonnés peuvent inonder le réseau d'une grande quantité de demandes difficiles à satisfaire dans le but de surcharger soit l'infrastructure du réseau soit les producteurs de contenus. Ce travail de thèse prouve que bien que des contre-mesures contre les IFAs aient été proposées, il manque une compréhension complète de leur efficacité réelle puisque celles-ci ont été testées sous des hypothèses simplistes sur les scénarios d'évaluation. Dans l'ensemble, le travail présenté dans ce manuscrit permet de mieux comprendre les implications des IFAs et les opportunités d'améliorer les mécanismes de défense existants contre ces attaques. Les principales contributions de ce travail de thèse tournent autour d'une analyse de sécurité du plan d'acheminement dans l'architecture NDN. En particulier, ce travail définit un modèle d'attaquant plus robuste pour les IFAs à travers l'identification des failles dans les contre-mesures IFA existantes. Ce travail introduit un nouvel ensemble d'IFAs basé sur le modèle d'attaquant proposé. Les nouveaux IFAs sont utilisés pour réévaluer les plus efficaces contre-mesures IFA existantes. Les résultats de cette évaluation réfutent l'efficacité universelle des mécanismes de défense existants contre l'IFA et, par conséquent, appellent à différentes contre-mesures pour protéger le NDN contre cette menace de sécurité. Pour surmonter le problème révélé, ce travail définit également des contre-mesures proactives contre l'IFA, qui sont de nouveaux mécanismes de défense contre les IFA inspirés par les problèmes rencontrés dans l'état de l'art. Ce travail présente Charon, une nouvelle contre-mesure proactive contre l'IFA, et la teste contre les nouvelles IFAs. Ce travail montre que Charon est plus efficace que les contre-mesures IFA réactives existantes. Enfin, ce travail illustre la conception NDN.p4, c'est-à-dire la première implémentation d'un protocole ICN écrit dans le langage de haut niveau pour les processeurs de paquets P4. Le travail NDN.p4 est la première tentative dans la littérature visant à tirer parti des nouveaux techniques de réseaux programmables pour tester et évaluer différentes conceptions de plan de données NDN. Cette dernière contribution classe également les mécanismes alternatifs d'acheminement par rapport à un ensemble de propriétés cardinales de la PIT. Le travail souligne qu'il vaut la peine d'explorer d'autres mécanismes d'acheminement visant à concevoir un plan de données NDN moins vulnérable à la menace IFA<br>This work illustrates how today's Internet dominant usage trends motivate research on more content-oriented future network architectures. Among the emerging future Internet proposals, the promising Information-Centric Networking (ICN) research paradigm is presented. ICN aims to redesign Internet's core protocols to promote a shift in focus from hosts to contents. Among the ICN architectures, the Named-Data Networking (NDN) envisions users' named content requests to be forwarded by their names in routers along the path from one consumer to 1-or-many sources. NDN's requests leave trails in traversed routers which are then followed backwards by the requested contents. The Pending Interest Table (PIT) is the NDN's data-plane component which temporarily records forwarded content requests in routers. On one hand, this work explains that the PIT stateful mechanism enables properties like requests aggregation, multicast responses delivery and native hop-by-hop control flow. On the other hand, this work illustrates how the PIT stateful forwarding behavior can be easily abused by malicious users to mount disruptive distributed denial of service attacks (DDoS), named Interest Flooding Attacks (IFAs). In IFAs, loosely coordinated botnets can flood the network with a large amount of hard to satisfy requests with the aim to overload both the network infrastructure and the content producers. This work proves that although countermeasures against IFAs have been proposed, a fair understanding of their real efficacy is missing since those have been tested under simplistic assumptions about the evaluation scenarios. Overall, the work presented in this manuscript shapes a better understanding of both the implications of IFAs and the possibilities of improving the state-of-the-art defense mechanisms against these attacks. The main contributions of this work revolves around a security analysis of the NDN's forwarding plane. In particular, this work defines a more robust attacker model for IFAs by identifying flaws in the state-of-the-art IFA countermeasures. This work introduces a new set of IFAs built upon the proposed attacker model. The novel IFAs are used to re-assess the most effective existing IFA countermeasures. Results of this evaluation disproves the universal efficacy of the state-of-the-art IFA defense mechanisms and so, call for different countermeasures to protect the NDN against this threat. To overcome the revealed issue, this work also defines proactive IFA countermeasures, which are novel defense mechanisms against IFAs inspired by the issues with the state-of-the-art ones. This work introduces Charon, a novel proactive IFA countermeasure, and tests it against the novel IFA attacks. This work shows Charon counteracts latest stealthy IFAs better than the state-of-the-art reactive countermeasures. Finally, this work illustrates the NDN.p4 design, that is, the first implementation of an ICN protocol written in the high-level language for packet processors P4. The NDN.p4 work is the first attempt in the related literature to leverage novel programmable-networks technologies to test and evaluate different NDN forwarding plane designs. This last contribution also classifies existing alternative forwarding mechanisms with respect to a set of PIT cardinal properties. The work outlines that it is worth to explore alternative forwarding mechanisms aiming to design an NDN forwarding plane less vulnerable to the IFA threat

Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks is one of the most widespread security attacks to internet service providers. It is the most easily launched attack, but very difficult and expensive to detect and mitigate. In view of the devastating effect of DDoS attacks, there has been the increase on the adaptation of a network detection technique to reveal the presence of DDoS attack before huge traffic buildup to prevent service availability. Several works done on DDoS attack detection reveals that, the conventional DDoS attack detection methods based on statistical divergence is useful, however, the large surface area of the internet which serve as the main conduit for DDoS flooding attacks to occur, makes it difficult to use this approach to detect attacks on the network. Hence this research work is focused on using detection techniques based on a deep learning technique, because it is proven as the most effective detection technique against DDoS attacks. Out of the several deep neural network techniques available, this research focuses on one aspect of recurrent neural network called Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) and TensorFlow framework to build and train a deep neural network model to detect the presence of DDoS attacks on a network. This model can be used to develop an Intrusion Detection System (IDS) to aid in detecting DDoS attacks on the network. Also, at the completion of this project, the expectation of the produced model is to have a higher detection accuracy rates, and a low false alarm rates. Design Science Research Methodology (DSRM) was used to carry out this project. The test experiment for this work was performed on CPU and GPU base systems to determine the base system's effect on the detection accuracy of the model. To achieve the set goals, seven evaluating parameters were used to test the model's detection accuracy and performance on both Central Processing Unit (CPU) and Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) systems. The results reveal that the model was able to produce a detection accuracy of 99.968% on both CPU and GPU base system which is better than the results by Yuan et al. [55] which is 97.606%. Also the results prove that the model's performance does not depend on the based system used for the training but rather depends on the dataset size. However, the GPU systems train faster than CPU systems. It also revealed that increasing the value of epochs during training does not affect the models detection accuracy but rather extends the training time. This model is limited to detecting 17 different attack types on maintaining the same detection accuracy mentioned above. Further future work should be done to increase the detecting attack type to unlimited so that it will be able to detect all attack types.

L'un des défis majeurs du monde de ces dernières décennies a été l'augmentation continue de la population des personnes âgées dans les pays développés. D’où la nécessité de fournir des soins de qualité à une population en croissance rapide, tout en réduisant les coûts des soins de santé. Dans ce contexte, de nombreux travaux de recherche portent sur l’utilisation des réseaux de capteurs sans fil dans les systèmes WBAN (Wireless Body Area Network), pour faciliter et améliorer la qualité du soin et de surveillance médicale à distance. Ces réseaux WBAN soulèvent de nouveaux défis technologiques en termes de sécurité et de protection contre les anomalies et les attaques. Le mode de communication sans fil utilisé entre ces capteurs et l’unité de traitement accentue ces vulnérabilités. En effet les vulnérabilités dans un système WBAN se décomposent en deux parties principales. La première partie se compose des attaques possibles sur le réseau des capteurs médicaux et sur le médium de communications sans fils entre ces capteurs et l’unité de traitement. La deuxième partie se compose des attaques possibles sur les communications à haut débit entre le système WBAN et le serveur médical. L’objectif de cette thèse est de répondre en partie aux problèmes de détection des attaques dans un système WBAN de surveillance médicale à distance. Pour atteindre cet objectif, nous avons proposé un algorithme pour détecter les attaques de brouillage radio (jamming attack) qui visent le médium de communications sans fils entre les capteurs et l’unité de traitement. Ainsi nous avons proposé une méthode de mesure de divergence pour détecter les attaques de type flooding qui visent les communications à haut débit entre le système WBAN et le serveur médical<br>One of the major challenges of the world in recent decades is the continued increase in the elderly population in developed countries. Hence the need to provide quality care to a rapidly growing population while reducing the costs of health care is becoming a strategic challenge. In this context, many researches focus on the use of wireless sensor networks in WBAN (Wireless Body Area Network) systems to facilitate and improve the quality of medical care and remote monitoring. These WBAN systems pose new technological challenges in terms of security and protection against faults and attacks. The wireless communication mode used between the sensors and the collection node accentuates these vulnerabilities. Indeed vulnerabilities in a WBAN system are divided into two main parts. The first part consists of the possible attacks on the network of medical sensors and on the wireless communications medium between the sensors and the processing unit. The second part consists of possible attacks on high-speed communications between the WBAN system and the medical server. The objective of this thesis is to meet some of the problems of detecting attacks in a WBAN system for remote medical monitoring. To achieve this goal, we propose an algorithm to detect the jamming attacks targeting the wireless communications medium between the sensors and the processing unit. In addition we propose a method of measuring divergence to detect the flooding attacks targeting the high-speed communications between the WBAN system and the medical server