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Expert Systems
with Applications
Expert Systems with Applications 34 (2008) 1659–1665
www.elsevier.com/locate/eswa
Abstract
Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks generate enormous packets by a large number of agents and can easily exhaust the com-
puting and communication resources of a victim within a short period of time. In this paper, we propose a method for proactive detection
of DDoS attack by exploiting its architecture which consists of the selection of handlers and agents, the communication and compromise,
and attack. We look into the procedures of DDoS attack and then select variables based on these features. After that, we perform cluster
analysis for proactive detection of the attack. We experiment with 2000 DARPA Intrusion Detection Scenario Specific Data Set in order
to evaluate our method. The results show that each phase of the attack scenario is partitioned well and we can detect precursors of DDoS
attack as well as the attack itself.
2007 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
0957-4174/$ - see front matter 2007 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
doi:10.1016/j.eswa.2007.01.040
1660 K. Lee et al. / Expert Systems with Applications 34 (2008) 1659–1665
attacker should select the traffic type before launching sources (Mahajan et al., 2002). Hence, there can be more
attack. Most of the hackings can be traced for identifying false negatives, and pushing down to the victim can be
the attacker, whereas it is very difficult to discover the iden- blocked because of the serious congestion of downstream
tity of the attacker in DDoS attacks. It is because attackers links.
make the source addresses of IP packets faked by randomly Jung and Krishnamurthy (2002) discovered the fact that
generating. The attack packets are generated by a great most of the IP addresses in a flash crowd appeared at the
number of agent systems which are controlled by attacker web site before, while very few IP addresses appeared in
through handler systems. Attacker should select agents the case of DDoS attacks. This experimental result was
and handlers as many as possible before launching attack. adopted by Lee and Shieh (2005), who applied the history
For this, he/she must perform network scanning and of past IP addresses to attack detection and packet filter-
intrude the systems having security vulnerabilities to install ing. But this scheme is inappropriate for the case that a
attack software. Changes in traffic are expected during lot of legitimate users who have not visited before can
these attack preparation phases. simultaneously try to access a popular web site.
The objective of this study is identifying clues which can Gowadia et al. (2005) incorporated the occurrence
be used as precursors for detecting such attacks proac- probability of specific attacks in the existing Bayesian Net-
tively. The entropy concept is adopted to analyze the traffic works-based intrusion detection systems. By observing the
based on each attack phase by the use of cluster analysis input parameters, they suggested to anticipate the occur-
method. The results of this study can be applied to security rence probability of specific attacks corresponding to the
devices, such as IDS (Intrusion Detection System) or fire- sequence of input parameters. This method requires com-
wall, for recognizing such attacks proactively, and contri- munications among three agents. Exchanging information
bute to the correct attack detection if the attack has vulnerabilities in terms of security, and applying occur-
precursors are considered in a combined way. rence probability of attack events can lead to biased results
The remainder of this paper is as follows. Section 2 in correct attack detection.
introduces the previous researches relevant to DDoS attack Liao and Vemuri (2001) used K-nearest Neighbor Clas-
detection, and Section 3 explains DDoS attacks. The pro- sifier (KNNC) to categorize process into normal or intru-
posed method is presented in Section 4. Simulation results sive class. The KNNC calculates the similarity between
are included in Section 5. Finally, this paper is concluded in the new process and each training process instance, and
Section 6. basically assumes that the processes belonging to the same
class will cluster together in the vector space. It is excellent
2. Related works in attack detection, but the detector is computationally
expensive for real-time implementation when the number
There have been done lots of researches relevant to of processes simultaneously increases.
DDoS attack defense. DDoS attack is commonly The Radial-Basis-Function neural network (RBF-NN)
well known as a congestion-based attack. To detect such (Haykin, 1994) is used to recognize DDoS attacks from
attacks proactively, Cabrera et al. (2001) used Manage- the normal traffic (Gavrilis & Dermatas, 2005). RBF-NN
ment Information Base MIB traffic variables intimating detector is a two layer neural network. It uses nine packet
attack precursors. Network management systems (NMSs) parameters, and the frequencies of these parameters are
extract these variables from IP-based, TCP-based, UDP- estimated. Based on the frequencies, RBF-NN classifies
based, ICMP-based, and SNMP-based traffic. Each MIB traffic into attack or normal class. In this study, the IP
has different traffic rate when the network or system is spoofing characteristic which is one of the most definite
between normal and under attack in the perspective of vic- DDoS attack evidences is not considered for more correct
tim side. Each NMS analyzes the correlations between the attack detection. Regarding UDP type attacks, the detec-
communication MIB variables during the attack prepara- tion efficiency is lower than that of TCP type attacks,
tions and the rate-based MIB variables during attacks to and is apparently low in the beginning period of attacks.
recognize DDoS attack precursors proactively. This Defining K-means centers which minimizes the quantiza-
method is applied to one NMS domain. In case of multiple tion error is also difficult task.
NMS domain, that is, if attacker and victim are not located Stereilein et al. (2002) also presented an attack detection
in one NMS domain, it is impossible to detect the correla- system based on neural network. While it showed im-
tions of variables between during attack preparations and proved detection rate with a low false alarm rate when
during attacks. tested with DARPA 1999 IDS Evaluation data, using mul-
Jeong et al. (2006) used queueing model for attack detec- tilayer perception requires relatively more processing time
tion. He adopted it to output interfaces of intermediate for determination of attack detection. It does not sure
routers. The output queue exceeding threshold traffic is whether the time for attack detection is reduced or not.
considered as a partial attack path, and attack is deter- Akella et al. (2003) proposed a detection mechanism
mined if it continues to reach to the victim. Traffic conges- where each intermediate router detects traffic anomalies
tion caused by DDoS attack packets is more easily using profiles of normal traffic. Each router keeps track
observed at closer points to the victim than to the attack of destinations whose traffic occupies greater than a frac-
K. Lee et al. / Expert Systems with Applications 34 (2008) 1659–1665 1661
tion of the capacity of the outgoing link, and sends this attacker indirectly achieves it through handlers. Attacker
information to its neighbors. Attack detection is deter- selects these network-connected systems as many as possi-
mined by intermediate routers if the gathered traffic infor- ble. The agents will perform DDoS attack actually by send-
mation on a specific destination system exceeds the ing unaccountable amounts of malicious traffic to a target
predefined threshold. This scheme cannot distinguish the system simultaneously. The handlers and agents are
flash crowds from the DDoS attacks. Hence, false alarm commonly located in the external networks of victim’s
rate will be increased. and attacker’s network. Once the attacker successfully
Mahajan et al. (2002) proposed a defense mechanism accomplished the selection of handlers and agents, he/she
based on congestion of output queues in an intermediate controls communications among the three systems to com-
router. The congestion is estimated based on the rate of promise attack. Attack target, attack time/period, and
packet droppings. When it is necessary to limit the rate attack type is compromised through the communication
of incoming traffic responsible for congestion, the router and compromise, which is done in secure way not to reveal
sends pushback message to request upstream routers to the attack. After the completion of preparations for attack,
limit the bandwidth of its outgoing links. This scheme does which is selecting handlers and agents and compromising
not provide intelligent detection method for DDoS attack. attack, a great number of agents launch DDoS attack to
It only focused on controlling the traffic which causes the victim simultaneously. Mostly, for selecting handlers
congestion. and agents, scanning is performed to find hosts which have
Considering the previous schemes, there is commonly security vulnerabilities, and ICMP is usually used for scan-
tradeoff between attack efficiency and cost. Increasing the ning. For secure communication and compromise among
attack detection rate requires the increase of false alarm the three systems, the messages for information exchange
rate or increment of computational overheads or memory are usually encrypted.
overheads. While detecting attacks as soon as possible is The agents generate some types of DDoS attack traffic
very important for preparing defense measures in DDoS among TCP, UDP, and ICMP type. Under a DDoS attack,
attacks, most of the previous researches have been focused the victim or related network is seriously jammed with spe-
on the traffic generated by agents to extract detection cific types of traffic heading for the victim. The agents ran-
parameters. It is valuable to analyze the traffic generated domly generate the source IP addresses of attack packets to
during attack preparation phases as well as that generated hide their real addresses. They also randomize the destina-
during attack phases for proactive attack detection. There- tion and source port numbers depending on the attack
fore, it is necessary to develop a method, which compen- type, whereas flash crowds (Jung & Krishnamurthy,
sates for these drawbacks, for proactive DDoS attack 2002) traffic does not. In a DDoS attack, tracing and iden-
detection. tifying the real attacker is very difficult because the source
IP addresses are spoofed based on the hierarchical attack
3. DDoS attack architecture.
There are two ways to paralyze a victim or network (Lin
The techniques of DDoS attacks have been evolved & Tseng, 2004). The one is only sending a great number of
since these attacks have first appeared in June of 1998 malicious packets toward a victim, such as UDP flood
(Lin & Tseng, 2004). However, the general attack model attack and ICMP flood attack. UDP flood attack is possi-
and procedures were not changed. In Fig. 1, attacker sets ble when an attacker sends an enormous number of UDP
up hierarchical attack architecture. For this, at first, an traffic with random destination port numbers to a victim.
attacker chooses more than one handler which has security ICMP flood attacks make the agents send large volumes
vulnerabilities, and intrudes them by gaining access right. of ICMP Echo Request packets (‘‘ping’’) to a victim. These
And the procedures for selecting agents (or zombies) are packets require so many ICMP Echo Reply packets as a
performed as the same way for selecting handlers, but the response from the victim, and induce the saturation of
bandwidth of the victim. The consequence of the flood
attacks is that the victim or related network is occupied
with such malicious traffic. Hence, it has not sufficient
bandwidth to allocate for the legitimate users. The other
way for paralyzing a system or network is that attackers
make use of the vulnerabilities of network protocol. For
example, TCP-SYN flooding attack uses the connection
characteristic of three-way handshaking of TCP protocol.
By spoofing the source IP addresses of attack packets,
the victim has a lot of half-opened connections, which
result in the resource consumption of the victim system.
For detecting DDoS attacks proactively, the traffic fea-
tures observed in each attack procedure are used in this
Fig. 1. Architecture of DDoS attack. research using cluster analysis.
1662 K. Lee et al. / Expert Systems with Applications 34 (2008) 1659–1665
dissimilarities among them. Hence, in this paper, we apply Lab, 2000). This attack scenario is carried out over multi-
cluster analysis to separate each phase of the DDoS attack ple network and audit sessions. These sessions have been
and identify precursors for detection. grouped into five attack phases. The five phases are as
There are two main types of cluster algorithms; hierar- follows:
chical and partitioning (Kaufman & Rousseeuw, 1990).
Partitioning method is inappropriate for our case because 1. IPsweep to the DMZ hosts from a remote site.
the number of clusters should be pre-determined in parti- 2. Probe of live IP’s to look for the sadmind daemon run-
tioning, even though we have no information about it. ning on Solaris hosts.
Therefore, we adopt a hierarchical method. This method 3. Breaks-in via the sadmind vulnerability, both successful
is often used to classify plants and animals, and is expected and unsuccessful on those hosts.
to be adequate for classifying the phases of the DDoS 4. Installation of the Trojan mstream DDoS software on
attack by the use of their features. three hosts in the DMZ.
We use nine variables, which are explained in the previ- 5. Launching the DDoS.
ous section, in the process of forming clusters. Each vari-
able is normalized to eliminate the effect of difference Fig. 2 shows the network structure of this data set. In
between scales of the variables. With normalization, vari- this simulation, we consider the DMZ concept on the net-
ables become work architecture. Since we adopt the DMZ, attackers can-
x x not access the victim hosts in the inside network directly.
z¼ ; To attack the victim host in the inside network, attackers
s
have to control the agent hosts in DMZ network. This
where x is the value of each variable, x is the mean of sam- Data Set has two types of Tcpdump file. One is DMZ Tcp-
ple data set, s is sample standard deviation. dump which is collected at the sniffer on the DMZ net-
To measure dissimilarities among clusters, cluster analy- work, the other is inside Tcpdump which is collected at
sis compute distance measures from the variables. The the sniffer on the inside network. In this attack scenario,
most common distance measures are Euclidian distance, the attacker only communicates with agent hosts in the
the geometric distance in multidimensional space, and DMZ network and can not communicate with the victim
Mahalanobis distance based on the covariance matrix of host in the inside network. For this reason, we use the
the variables (Staniford-Chen et al., 1998). In the proposed DMZ Tcpdump file to detect the DDoS attack in early
method, we use Euclidian distance since Mahalanobis dis- phases. In phase 5 of the attack, packets collected to
tance requires the variables to be distributed multivariate DMZ Tcpdump are not the attack packet but the response
normal. Normality is often violated by many data sets packets to the spoofed IP of the attack packets.
and may not be true for network traffic data. The formula The data files were collected over a span of approxi-
of Euclidian distance is as follows: mately 3 h. In our simulation, each input variable of pro-
sffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffi posed method is calculated in certain unit time which is
Xn
Dðx; yÞ ¼ ðxi y i Þ ;
2 1 s. The variables collected are normalized. After normali-
i¼1 zation, we perform cluster analysis using SAS Enterprise
Miner. In this simulation we use hierarchical method and
where x and y are two records to be clustered and n is the Ward’s linkage rule and CCC measure to determine cluster
number of variables measured. number, as mentioned earlier (SAS Institute, 1990).
After calculating distance measures, Ward’s minimum- Table 1 shows the result of the cluster analysis. The data
variance method is employed as a linkage rule. In Ward’s set is partitioned into six clusters. From the descriptions of
method, the distance between two clusters is the ANOVA data sets, we can examine which cluster corresponds to the
sum of squares between the two clusters added up over specific phase. Cluster 1 and 2 correspond to the normal
all the variables. At each generation, the within-cluster period. Cluster 3 and 4 correspond to the phase 1 and 2,
sum of squares is minimized over all partitions. To deter- respectively. Cluster 5 corresponds to the DDoS attack
mine the number of cluster, we use Cubic Clustering Crite- phase which continues 5 s. Cluster 6 has only one member
rion (CCC) developed by W. S. Sarle of SAS Institute and its feature is very similar to cluster 5, attack phase.
(Johnson, 1998; SAS Institute, 1990). CCC measure plots
the CCC values versus the number of clusters and watches
for peak. The CCC should be grater than three and form a
peak at a possible cluster solution.
5. Simulation results
Table 2
Average of each cluster
Variable Cluster
1 Normal 2 Normal 3 Phase 1 4 Phase 2 5 Attack 6 Post-attack
Entropy of source IP 1.59 1.06 0.71 0.08 0.02 0.13
Entropy of source port 1.61 1.07 0.56 0.12 12.4 11.4
Entropy of destination IP 1.58 1.06 4.91 0.07 12.6 11.5
Entropy of destination port 1.50 1.07 0.55 0.12 12.6 11.5
Entropy of packet type 1.12 1.36 0.53 0.04 0.02 0.12
Number of packets 37.0 4.70 41.4 1.19 6225 2876
Occurrence rate of TCP SYN 0.02 0.44 0 0 0 0
Occurrence rate of UDP 0.00 0 0 0.99 0 0
Occurrence rate of ICMP 0.00 0 0.87 0 0 0
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