Detection of DDOS attacks in distributed peer to peer networks

Abstract

Peer to Peer (P2P) network in the real world is a class of systems that are made up of thousands of nodes in distributed environments. The nodes are decentralized in nature. P2P networks are widely used for sharing resources and information with ease. Gnutella is one of the well known examples for such network. Since these networks spread across the globe with large scale deployment of nodes, adversaries use them as a vehicle to launch DDoS attacks. P2P networks are exploited to make attacks over hosts that provide critical services to large number of clients across the globe. As the attacker does not make a direct attack it is hard to detect such attacks and considered to be high risk threat to Internet based applications. Many techniques came into existence to defeat such attacks. Still, it is an open problem to be addressed as the flooding-based DDoS is difficult to handle as huge number of nodes are compromised to make attack and source address spoofing is employed. In this paper, we proposed a framework to identify and secure P2P communications from a DDoS attacks in distributed environment. Time-to-Live value and distance between source and victim are considered in the proposed framework. A special agent is used to handle information about nodes, their capacity, and bandwidth for efficient trace back. A Simulation study has been made using NS2 and the experimental results reveal the significance of the proposed framework in defending P2P network and target hosts from high risk DDoS attacks.