Enhancement of the Detection of the TCP SYN Flooding (DDoS) Attack

Abstract

The major of DDoS attacks use TCP protocol and the TCP SYN flooding attack is the most common one among them. The SYN Cookie mechanism is used to defend against the TCP SYN flooding attack. It is an effective defense, but it has a disadvantage of high calculations and it doesn’t differentiate spoofed packets from legitimate packets. Therefore, filtering the spoofed packet can effectively enhance the SYN Cookie activity. Hop Count Filtering (HCF) is another mechanism used at the server side to filter spoofed packets. This mechanism has a drawback of being not a perfect and final solution in defending against the TCP SYN flooding attack. An enhanced mechanism of Integrating and combining the SYN Cookie with Hop Count Filtering (HCF) mechanism is proposed to protect the server from TCP SYN flooding. The results show that the defense against SYN flood DDoS attack is enhanced, since the availability of legitimate packets is increased and the time of SYN Cookie activity is delayed.

Keywords

• DDoS attack, TCP SYN flooding attack, spoofed packets, SYN Cookie mechanism, HCF mechanism