A novel approach to detecting DDoS attacks at an early stage

Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attacks pose a serious threat to Internet security. Most current research focuses on detection and prevention methods on the victim server or source side. To date, there has been no work on defenses using valuable information from the innocent client whose IP has been used in attacking packets. In this paper, we propose a novel cooperative system for producing warning of a DDoS attack. The system consists of a client detector and a server detector. The client detector is placed on the innocent client side and uses a Bloom filter-based detection scheme to generate accurate detection results yet consumes minimal storage and computational resources. The server detector can actively assist the warning process by sending requests to innocent hosts. Simulation results show that the cooperative technique presented in this paper can yield accurate DDoS alarms at an early stage. We theoretically show the false alarm probability of the detection scheme, which is insensitive to false alarms when using specially designed evaluation functions.