A Low-Overhead and High-Precision Attack Traceback Scheme with Combination Bloom Filters

Abstract

Distributed denial of service attacks seriously threatens the availability of highly resilient software-defined networking systems, such as data center networks. A traceback scheme is an effective means of mitigating attacks by identifying the location of the attacker and the attacking path. However, traditional traceback schemes suffer from low traceability success rates, high packet header overheads, and high communication traffic overheads, in addition to the fact that logically centralized traceability schemes make the control plane a prime target for attacks. To overcome the above challenges, we propose the low-overhead and high-precision traceback scheme, which is divided into two stages: packet marking and path reconstruction. The first stage of the traceback scheme utilizes programmable switches in the data plane to selectively mark the actual physical path information that the packet was forwarded on. The marking method is adaptive to the path length, which utilizes a combined Bloom filter so that the packet length does not grow with the length of the attacking path. The proposed probabilistic packet marking algorithm effectively reduces the number of packets collected to reconstruct the attacking path. The second stage of the traceback scheme utilizes the distributed victim host to reconstruct the attacking path without the controller and locate the source of the attacker. Theoretical analysis and experimental results show that the proposed scheme ensures the high accuracy of tracing and minimizes the traffic overhead and storage overhead required for the traceback process.

IGPPM: interface grouped probabilistic packet marking scheme for IP traceback

“…The primary objective is to utilize and combine existing methods to leverage their strengths. The core idea of packet marking method [11][12][13][14][15][16] is to record routing information within the packet itself, allowing the victim to trace the packet's transmission path. A packet can carry complete encoded routing information or have one or more markers inserted by intermediate routers.…”

“…Efficient probabilistic packet marking for Autonomous System (AS) traceback proposed by Nur A. Y. [11] in recent years, the scheme utilizing a combination of Bloom filters for marking developed by Jie Ma [12] and a probabilistic packet marking scheme with traffic-aware capabilities introduced by Mingxing Liu [13] are all typical PPM-based approaches. In DPM (also known as Node Attachment), traceback data from the entire path is appended to the original IP packet header as it travels along the path.…”