Detection of DDoS Backscatter Based on Traffic Features of Darknet TCP Packets

Abstract

In this work, we propose a method to discriminate backscatter caused by DDoS attacks from normal traffic. Since DDoS attacks are imminent threats which could give serious economic damages to private companies and public organizations, it is quite important to detect DDoS backscatter as early as possible. To do this, 11 features of port/IP information are defined for network packets which are sent within a short time, and these features of packet traffic are classified by Suppurt Vector Machine (SVM). In the experiments, we use TCP packets for the evaluation because they include control flags (e.g. SYN-ACK, RST-ACK, RST, ACK) which can give label information (i.e. Backscatter or non-backscatter). We confirm that the proposed method can discriminate DDoS backscatter correctly from unknown dark net TCP packets with more than 90% accuracy.