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Since late 1999, DDoS (distributed denial of service) attack has drawn many attentions from both research and industry communities. Many potential solutions (e.g., ingress filtering, packet marking or tracing, and aggregate-based congestion control or rate limiting) have been proposed to handle this network bandwidth consumption attack. Among them, "ICMP traceback (iTrace)" is currently being considered as an industry standard by the IETF (Internet Engineering Task Force). While the idea of iTrace is very clever, efficient, reasonably secure and practical, it suffers a serious statistic problem such that the chance for "useful" and "valuable" iTrace messages can be extremely small against various types of DDoS attacks. This implies that most of the network resources spent on generating and utilizing iTrace messages will be wasted. Therefore, we propose a simple enhancement called "intention-driven" iTrace, which conceptually introduces an extra bit in the routing and forwarding process. With the new "intention-bit", it is shown that, through our simulation study, the performance of iTrace improves dramatically. This work has been proposed to IETF's ICMP Trace-Back working group.
Mankin et al. (2002) studied this question.