Embedded systems are extensively used in home automation systems, small office systems, vehicle communication systems, and health service systems. The services provided by these systems are available on the Internet and these services need to be protected. Security features like IP filtering, UDP protection, or TCP protection need to be implemented depending on the specific application used by the device. Every device on the Internet must have network interface. This paper proposes the design of the embedded Secured Ethernet Interface System to protect the service available on the Internet against the SYN flood attack. In this experimental study, Secured Ethernet Interface System is customized to protect the web service against the SYN flood attack. Secured Ethernet Interface System is implemented on ALTERA Stratix IV FPGA as a system on chip and uses the modified SYN flood attack protection method. The experimental results using Secured Ethernet Interface System indicate increase in number of genuine clients getting service from the server, considerable improvement in the data transfer rate, and better response time during the SYN flood attack.

DDoS attack is generated by the attacker on the server, so that the genuine clients will not have access to the services provided by server. To protect servers from such attacks, large variety of security systems are available. The best security system can be selected by comparing the performance of these systems. There is a need to generate attacks at very high speed to test the performance of security system. This manuscript presents the design of FPGA based reconfigurable hardware System-on-Chip (SoC), that can generate the SYN flood attacks at high speed in real time. The SoC SYN flood attack is implemented using the soft core NIOS II processor, Triple_Speed Ethernet, etc. The manuscript also compares the attacks generated using such hardware based SoC SYN flood attacker with the SYN flood attacks generated using purely software based tool hping3. It is found that the attacks generated using FPGA based system is much faster than software based tool.The same hardware design can be used to generate many different types of attacks such as spoofed, non-spoofed, layer 3 , layer 4 attacks like TCP flood attack, UDP attack, ICMP flood attack, TCP SYN-ACK attack, TCP FIN-ACK attack, etc. Such attacks are essential to benchmark the security systems. The proposed technique can be used as industry standard to benchmark the performance of the security systems. General TermsSecurity, syn flood attack, fpga.