STF-DM: A Sparsely Tagged Fragmentation with Dynamic Marking an IP Traceback Approach

Denial of Service (DoS) and Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks are serious threats to the Internet. The frequency of DoS and DDoS attacks is increasing day by day. Automated tools are also available that enable non-technical people to implement such attacks easily. Hence, it is not only important to prevent such attacks, but also need to trace back the attackers. Tracing back the sources of the attacks, which is known as an IP traceback problem is a hard problem because of the stateless nature of the Internet and spoofed Internet Protocol (IP) packets.Various approaches have been proposed for IP traceback. Probabilistic Packet Marking (PPM) approach incurs the minimum network and management overhead. Hence, we focus on PPM approach. Sparsely-Tagged Fragmentation Marking Scheme (S-TFMS), a PPM based approach, requires low overhead at the victim and achieve zero false-positives. However, it requires a large number of packets to recover the IP addresses. In this paper, we propose a Sparsely-Tagged Fragmentation Marking approach with dynamic marking probability. Our approach requires less number of packets than required by S-TFMS. Further, to reduce the number of packets required by victim, we extend our basic approach with the new marking format. Our extended approach requires less than one-tenth time number of packets than those in S-TFMS approach to recover the IP addresses. Our approaches recover the IP address quickly with zero false-positives in the presence of multiple attackers. We show mathematical as well as experimental analysis of our approaches