Distributed Denial of Service Attacks

This title is printed to order. This book may have been self-published. If so, we cannot guarantee the quality of the content. In the main most books will have gone through the editing process however some may not. We therefore suggest that you be aware of this before ordering this book. If in doubt check either the author or publisher’s details as we are unable to accept any returns unless they are faulty. Please contact us if you have any questions.

Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks are attempts to overwhelm a computer system in order to deny access by legitimate users. They are generally unstoppable, but there is a good deal of on-going research on methods to reduce their negative effects. This paper will deal with the design of a model that simulates such an attack. The simulation model is then used to study possible ways to defend against these attacks. Three experiments are run: 1) using a priority queue to sort messages from clients based on how many connections they have open on the server; 2) limiting the number of connections each client can create; and 3) having the server forcefully delete the oldest established connection, whenever its connection table becomes full. Results show that method 1 is totally ineffective while method 2 somewhat improves the overall performance of the system. However, method 3, combined with method 2, produces significantly improved performance against a DDoS attack.