A More Practical Approach for Single-Packet IP Traceback using Packet Logging and Marking

Tracing IP packets to their origins is an important step in defending Internet against denial-of-service attacks. Two kinds of IP traceback techniques have been proposed as packet marking and packet logging. In packet marking, routers probabilistically write their identification information into forwarded packets. This approach incurs little overhead but requires large flow of packets to collect the complete path information. In packet logging, routers record digests of the forwarded packets. This approach makes it possible to trace a single packet and is considered more powerful. At routers forwarding large volume of traffic, the high storage overhead and access time requirement for recording packet digests introduce practicality problems. In this paper, we present a novel scheme to improve the practicality of log-based IP traceback by reducing its overhead on routers. Our approach makes an intelligent use of packet marking to improve scalability of log-based IP traceback. We use mathematical analysis and simulations to evaluate our approach. Our evaluation results show that, compared to the state-of-the-art log-based approach called hash-based IP traceback, our approach maintains the ability to trace single IP packet while reducing the storage overhead by half and the access time overhead by a factor of the number of neighboring routers.

1 Introduction

Denial-of-service(DoS) attacks have been threatening the utility of the Internet severely [1]. In 2002, a coordinated attack on the Internet name service infrastructure showed the possibility and potential impact of such dedicated attacks [2]. More recently, it was reported that DoS attacks have been used as a means of extortion and have become the subject of lawsuits [3]. Defending against DoS attacks requires not only measures for mitigating the effects of the attacks but also mechanisms for identifying the entities accountable for such attacks.