Computer Security:

Principles and Practice

Chapter 7: Denial-of-Service Attacks

EECS710: Information Security

Professor Hossein Saiedian
Fall 2014
Denial-of-service
• Denial of service (DoS) an action that prevents or impairs the
authorized use of networks, systems, or applications by exhausting
resources such as central processing units (CPU), memory,
bandwidth, and disk space
• Attacks (overload or invalid request services that consume
significant resources)
• network bandwidth
• system resources
• application resources
• Have been an issue for some time (25% of respondents to an FBI
survey)
Classic DoS attacks
• Flooding ping command
• Aim of this attack is to overwhelm the capacity of the network connection to
the target organization
• Traffic can be handled by higher capacity links on the path, but packets are
discarded as capacity decreases
• Source of the attack is clearly identified unless a spoofed address is
used
• Network performance is noticeably affected
Classic DoS attacks
Internet Control Message Protocol (ICMP)
• The Internet Control Message Protocol (ICMP) is one of the main IP
protocols; it is used by network devices, like routers, to send error
messages indicating (e.g., a requested service is not available or a
host or router could not be reached)

The host must respond to all echo requests with an

echo reply containing the exact data received in the
request message
Source address spoofing
• Use forged source addresses
• Usually via the raw socket interface on operating systems
• Makes attacking systems harder to identify
• Attacker generates large volumes of packets that have the
target system as the destination address
• Congestion would result in the router connected to the
final, lower capacity link
• Backscatter traffic
• Advertise routes to unused IP addresses to monitor attack traffic
Backscatter traffic
• Security researchers (Honeypot Project) advertise blocks of unused IP
addresses (no real/legit uses)
• If ICMP/connection request is made, most likely from attackers
• Monitoring provides valuable info on the type and scale of attack
SYN spoofing
• Common DoS attack
• Attacks the ability of a server to respond to future connection
requests by overflowing the tables used to manage them
• Thus legitimate users are denied access to the server
• Hence an attack on system resources, specifically the network
handling code in the operating system
TCP connection handshake

syn/ack pkts
y= server seq#
x= client seq#
SYN spoofing attack

assumption: most connections succeed and thus table cleared quickly

SYN spoofing attack: attacker’s source
• Attacker often uses either
• random source addresses (addresses that may not exist)
• or that of an overloaded server (that may not send a RST)
• to block return of (most) reset packets
• Has much lower traffic volume
• attacker can be on a much lower capacity link
• Objective: uses addresses that will not respond to the SYN-ACK with a
RST
Types of flooding attacks
• Classified based on network protocol used
• Objective: to overload the network capacity on some link to a
server
• Virtually any type of network packet can be used
• ICMP Flood
• Uses ICMP packets, eg ping (echo) request
• Typically allowed through, some required
• UDP Flood
• Alternative uses UDP packets to random ports (even if no service is
available, attacker achieves its goal)
• TCP SYN Flood (SYN spoof vs SYN flood)
• Sends TCP SYN (connection request) packets
• But for volume attack
UDP packet
• User Datagram Protocol (UDP) is a
component of the IP suite and allows
computer applications to send
messages
• A UDP can be directed at practically
any service (port); if service is
unavailable, the packet is discarded
but the attacker objective is achieved

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Distributed DoS attacks
• Have limited volume if single source used
• Multiple systems allow much higher traffic volumes to
form a distributed DoS (DDoS) attack
• Often compromised PC’s/workstations
• Zombies with backdoor programs installed
• Forming a botnet
• Example: Tribe Flood Network (TFN), TFN2K
• did ICMP, SYN, UDPF and ICMP floods
DDoS control hierarchy
Attacker sends one command to the handler zombies;
the handler forwards to other handlers, agents
Application-based bandwidth attacks
• Force the victim system to execute resource-consuming operations
(e.g., searches, complex DB queries)
• VoIP Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) flood (see Figure 7.5): attacker
sends many INVITE requests; major burden on the proxies
• server resources depleted while handling requests
• bandwidth capacity is consumed

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SIP invite
scenario
• Standard protocol for
VoIP telephony
• Text-based protocol
with a syntax similar to
that of HTTP
• Two types of SIP
messages: requests
and responses
HTTP-based attacks
• Attempts to monopolize by sending HTTP requests that never
complete
• Eventually consumes Web server’s connection capacity
• Utilizes legitimate HTTP traffic
• Spidering: Bots starting from a given HTTP link and following all links
on the provided Web site in a recursive way
• Existing intrusion detection and prevention solutions that rely on
signatures to detect attacks will generally not recognize Slowloris
Reflection attacks
• Attacker sends packets to a known service on the
intermediary with a spoofed source address of the actual
target system
• When intermediary responds, the response is sent to the
target
• “Reflects” the attack off the intermediary (reflector)
• Goal is to generate enough volumes of packets to flood the
link to the target system without alerting the intermediary
• The basic defense against these attacks is blocking
spoofed-source packets
Reflection attacks
Reflection attacks
• Further variation creates a self-contained loop between
intermediary and target (attacker spoofs using port 7
requiring echoes)
• Fairly easy to filter and block
DNS reflection attacks
DNS amplification attacks
• Use packets directed at a legitimate DNS server as the
intermediary system
• Attacker creates a series of DNS requests containing the
spoofed source address of the target system
• Exploit DNS behavior to convert a small request to a much
larger response (amplification)
• Target is flooded with responses
• Basic defense against this attack is to prevent the use of
spoofed source addresses
Amplification attacks

Can take advantage of broadcast address of some network

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Four lines of defense against DDoS attacks
• Attack prevention and preemption (before attack)
• Attack detection and filtering (during the attack)
• Attack source traceback and identification (uring and after the attack)
• Attack reaction (after the attack)
DoS attack prevention
• Block spoofed source addresses
• On routers as close to source as possible
• Filters may be used to ensure path back to the claimed source address is
the one being used by the current packet
• Filters must be applied to traffic before it leaves the ISP’s network or at the point of
entry to their network
• Use modified TCP connection handling code
• Cryptographically encode critical information in a cookie that is sent as the server’s
initial sequence number
• Legitimate client responds with an ACK packet containing the incremented sequence
number cookie
• Drop an entry for an incomplete connection from the TCP connections table when it
overflows
Attack prevention
• Rate controls in upstream distribution nets
• On specific packets types e.g. some ICMP, some UDP, TCP/SYN
• Impose limits
• Use modified TCP connection handling
• Server sends SYN cookies when table full (reconstruct table data
from the cookie from legit clients)
• Sr selective or random drop when table full
Attack prevention
• Block IP directed broadcasts
• Block suspicious services and combinations
• Manage application attacks with a form of graphical puzzle
(captcha) to distinguish legitimate human requests
• Use mirrored and replicated servers when high-
performance and reliability is required
Responding to attacks
• Good incidence response plan
• Details on how to contact technical personal for ISP
• Needed to impose traffic filtering upstream
• Details of how to respond to the attack
• Implement anti-spoofing, directed broadcast, and rate limiting filters
• Ideally have network monitors and IDS to detect and notify abnormal
traffic patterns
Responding to attacks
• Identify type of attack
• Capture and analyze packets
• Design filters to block attack traffic upstream
• Or identify and correct system/application bug
• Have ISP trace packet flow back to source
• May be difficult and time consuming
• Necessary if planning legal action
• Implement contingency plan
• Switch to alternate backup servers
• Commission new servers at a new site with new addresses
• Update incident response plan
Summary
• Introduced denial of service (DoS) attacks
• Classic flooding and SYN spoofing attacks
• ICMP, UDP, TCP SYN floods
• Distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks
• Reflection and amplification attacks
• Defenses against DoS attacks
• Responding to DoS attacks