Modelling and simulation of DDOS Attack using SimEvents
Abubakar Bala, Yahya Esmail Osais, Saudi Arabia · 2013
At the beginning of the 21st century, a new form of denial of service (DoS) attack emerged which is the Distributed DoS (DDoS). This new form of attack was launched on huge number of prominent websites such as yahoo, e-bay, Amazon, and buy.com, resulting in tremendous financial lose s. DDoS attack has continued to increase over the y ears due to the rapid increase in internet users. Moreover, even more ala rming is the fact that developers of DDoS tools hav e assumed unprecedented sophistication in their design method s, thus making their attacks highly destructive and undetectable. As a result of these reason and many others, researchers have f ocused their attention on the study of this new met hod of attack, they are particularly interested in studying its evolution, and with this knowledge they are being able to desi gn anti-DDoS tools in order to prevent networks from falling into the clutches of DDoS attack. In this research work, a DDoS attac k is simulated using MATLAB's SimEvents , with the aim of finding the quantitative measure of its effect on the victim, experiments conducted in this study show that the server is scarcely utilize d in its normal working condi-tions thus having hig h availability and low average utilization since it accepts requests only from legitimate clients. However, as the attacker l aunches an attack on the server, its utilization increases sharply and thus resulting in decrease in availability, this is beca use the server is flooded with illegal requests from the attacker as well as zombi es from within the network domain. Additional study reveals that when a warm-up phase is added to the simulation of the ser ver failure, the utilization suddenly increases due to the fact that the attacker seizes the opportunity of the slow recover y of the server to further overwhelm it and eventua lly push it into saturation. Index Terms —Modelling, simulation, DDoS, DoS, SimEvents, MATLAB