Mirror hopping approach for selective denial of service prevention

This paper focuses on a category of denial of service (DoS) attacks, a growing concern in the information security arena, namely the selective DoS (S-DoS). We propose an S-DoS prevention approach by extending the well-known mirror sites idea by redirecting different access requests from the same user to different mirror sites. We develop an HTTP (hypertext transfer protocol) parser that fragments the HTTP requests for communication between the client and server. Random assignment of the requests to different mirror sites ensures that the attacker cannot succeed by capturing requests for a single Web server and the high degree of unpredictability in mirror selection makes it computationally and resource intensive for an attacker to predict the next chosen mirror site. A suite of analysis of the proposed scheme is presented as a merit of this approach.