A framework for countering denial of service attacks

Recent trend of the adversaries "if I can\´t have it, nobody can" has changed the emphasis of information assurance with respect to information availability. This paper presents a knowledge discovery framework to detect DoS attacks at the boundary controllers (routers). The idea is to use machine learning approach to discover network features that can depict the state of the network connection. Using important network data (DoS relevant features), we have developed kernel machine based and soft computing detection mechanisms that achieve high detection accuracies. We also present our work of identifying DoS pertinent features and evaluating the applicability of these features in detecting novel DoS attacks. Architecture for detecting DoS attacks at the router is presented. We demonstrate that highly efficient and accurate signature based classifiers can be constructed by using important network features and machine learning techniques to detect DoS attacks at the boundary controllers.