Software defined network-based HTTP flooding attack defender

Software defined network-based HTTP flooding attack defender

Mohammadi, Reza (Bu-Ali Sina University, Hamadan)
Lal, C. (TU Delft Cyber Security)
Conti, M. (TU Delft Cyber Security; University of Padua)
Sharma, Lokesh (Manipal University Jaipur)

2022

In recent years, the explosive growth of the Internet has led to an increment in the number of Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks. HTTP Flooding is a critical DDoS attack that targets HTTP servers to prohibit users from receiving HTTP services. Moreover, it saturates the link bandwidth and consumes network resources. Because the attack is launched at the application layer, it is difficult to defend against it using current countermeasures such as firewall or Intrusion Prevention System (IPS). In this paper, we propose SHFD, which leverages the Software-Defined Networking (SDN) paradigm to mitigate HTTP flooding attacks. We implement SHFD as a defender module on the SDN controller to detect and mitigate the attack in the first place. Experimental results gathered from Mininet confirm that SHFD brings a significant improvement of 13% in detection time and 29% in the number of blocked malicious flows compared to the state-of-the-art approaches.

Entropy
Hellinger distance
HTTP flooding attack
SDN

http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:985a3ea6-0897-46cb-b571-678533bfa56c

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.compeleceng.2022.108019

2022-11-13

0045-7906

Computers & Electrical Engineering, 101

Green Open Access added to TU Delft Institutional Repository 'You share, we take care!' - Taverne project https://www.openaccess.nl/en/you-share-we-take-care Otherwise as indicated in the copyright section: the publisher is the copyright holder of this work and the author uses the Dutch legislation to make this work public.

Institutional Repository

journal article

© 2022 Reza Mohammadi, C. Lal, M. Conti, Lokesh Sharma