Defending against Distributed Denial of Service Attacks: Issues and Challenges

ABSTRACT Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks on user machines, organizations, and infrastructures of the Internet have become highly publicized incidents and call for immediate solution. It is a complex and difficult problem characterized by an explicit attempt of the attackers to prevent access to resources by legitimate users for which they have authorization. Several schemes have been proposed on how to defend against these attacks, yet the problem still lacks a complete solution. The main purpose of this paper is therefore twofold. First is to present a comprehensive study of a wide range of DDoS attacks and defense methods proposed to combat them. This provides better understanding of the problem, current solution space, and future research scope to defend against DDoS attacks. Second is to propose an integrated solution for completely defending against flooding DDoS attacks at the Internet Service Provider (ISP) level.