RRED: robust RED algorithm to counter low-rate denial-of-service attacks

TLDR

Existing Random Early Detection (RED) algorithms are vulnerable to low‑rate denial‑of‑service attacks. This letter proposes a Robust RED (RRED) algorithm to improve TCP throughput against LDoS attacks. RRED detects and filters attack packets before applying the standard RED algorithm, and its performance was evaluated through simulations. Compared to existing RED‑like algorithms, RRED nearly fully preserves TCP throughput under LDoS attacks.

Abstract

The existing Random Early Detection (RED) algorithm and its variants are found vulnerable to emerging attacks, especially the Low-rate Denial-of-Service (LDoS) attacks. In this letter we propose a Robust RED (RRED) algorithm to improve the TCP throughput against LDoS attacks. The basic idea behind the RRED is to detect and filter out attack packets before a normal RED algorithm is applied to incoming flows. We conduct a set of simulations to evaluate the performance of the proposed RRED algorithm. The results show that, compared to existing RED-like algorithms, the RRED algorithm nearly fully preserves the TCP throughput in the presence of LDoS attacks.