Practical network support for IP traceback

  • Authors:
  • Stefan Savage;David Wetherall;Anna Karlin;Tom Anderson

  • Affiliations:
  • Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of Washington, Seattle, WA;Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of Washington, Seattle, WA;Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of Washington, Seattle, WA;Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of Washington, Seattle, WA

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the conference on Applications, Technologies, Architectures, and Protocols for Computer Communication
  • Year:
  • 2000

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Abstract

This paper describes a technique for tracing anonymous packet flooding attacks in the Internet back towards their source. This work is motivated by the increased frequency and sophistication of denial-of-service attacks and by the difficulty in tracing packets with incorrect, or ``spoofed'', source addresses. In this paper we describe a general purpose traceback mechanism based on probabilistic packet marking in the network. Our approach allows a victim to identify the network path(s) traversed by attack traffic without requiring interactive operational support from Internet Service Providers (ISPs). Moreover, this traceback can be performed ``post-mortem'' -- after an attack has completed. We present an implementation of this technology that is incrementally deployable, (mostly) backwards compatible and can be efficiently implemented using conventional technology.