Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Threat in Collaborative Environment - A Survey on DDoS Attack Tools and Traceback Mechanisms

Collaborative applications are feasible nowadays and are becoming more popular due to the advancement in Internetworking technology. The typical collaborative applications, in India include the space research, military applications, higher learning in Universities and satellite campuses, state and central government sponsored projects, e-governance, e-healthcare systems, etc. In such applications, computing resources for a particular institution/organization spread across districts and states and communication is achieved through internetworking. Therefore the computing and communication resources must be protected against security attacks as any compromise on these resources would jeopardize the entire application/mission. Collaborative environment is prone for various threats, of which distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks are of major concern. DDoS attack prevents legitimate access to critical resources. A survey by Arbor networks reveals that approximately 1,200 DDoS attacks occur per day. As the DDoS attack is coordinated, the defense for the same has to be a collaborative one. To counter DDoS attacks in a collaborative environment, all the routers need to work collaboratively by exchanging their caveat messages with their neighbors. This paper analyses the security measures in a collaborative environment, identifies the popular DDoS attack tools, and surveys the existing traceback mechanisms to trace the real attacker.