Modelling and Simulation Of DDoS Attack Using Simevents

Abstract

Denial of service (DoS) attack is a new form of attack which is also known as the Distributed DoS (DDoS). This new form of attack was launched on large number of websites such as yahoo, gmail, flipkart, and facebook. DDoS attack has been on rise as internet users have rapidly increased. As a result of these reason and many others, researchers have focused their attention on the study of this new method of attack, they are particularly interested in studying its evolution, and with this knowledge they are being able to design anti-DDoS tools in order to prevent networks from falling into the clutches of DDoS attack. In this research work, a DDoS attack is simulated using MATLAB’s SimEvents, with the aim of finding the quantitative measure of its effect on the victim, experiments conducted in this study show that the server is scarcely utilized in its normal working conditions thus having high availability and low average utilization since it accepts requests only from legitimate clients. However, as the attacker launches an attack on the server, its utilization increases sharply and thus resulting in decrease in availability, this is because the server is flooded with illegal requests from the attacker as well as zombies from within the network domain. Denial-of-service attacks can also lead to problems in the network 'branches' around the actual computer being attacked. For example, the bandwidth of a router between the Internet and a LAN may be consumed by an attack, compromising not only the intended computer, but also the entire network or other computers on the LAN. If the attack is conducted on a sufficiently large scale, entire geographical regions of Internet connectivity can be compromised without the attacker's knowledge or intent by incorrectly configured or flimsy network infrastructure equipment.