A Defence Strategy against Flooding Attack Using Puzzles by Game Theory

International Journal of Science and Research (IJSR), India Online ISSN: 2319-7064
Volume 2 Issue 9, September 2013
www.ijsr.net
A Defence Strategy against Flooding Attack Using
Puzzles by Game Theory
1
Ch. V. N. Madhuri, 2
R. V. Krishnaiah
1
M. Tech (CSE), B. Tech in CSE, Global Institute of Engineering & Technology, Moinabad, India
2
PhD, M. Tech in CSE from JNTU Hyderabad, M. Tech in EIE from NIT, Warangal, India
Abstract: Security issues have become a major issue in recent years due to the advancement of technology in networking and its use in
a destructive way. A number of Defence strategies have been devised to overcome the flooding attack which is prominent in the
networking industry due to which depletion of resources Takes place. But these mechanism are not designed in an optimally and
effectively and some of the issues have been unresolved. Hence in this paper we suggest a Game theory based strategy to create a series
of Defence mechanisms using puzzles. Here the concept of Nash equilibrium is used to handle sophisticated flooding attack to defend
distributed attacks from unknown number of sources
Keywords: Dos Attacks, Game Theory, Puzzles
1. Introduction
The pace with which the technology is advancing is
amazing. With the advancement in technology there has
been a great advancement in networking too. Networking
today has become inevitable and is a part and parcel in
various aspects of our life. If we consider the present
business and political scenario, there has been a rat-race
going on which has made individuals not only upgrade their
own resources but also degrade their competitor’s resources
by some malicious activities. Hence in recent years, security
concerned issues has received enormous attention in
networked system because of availability of services.
Networked systems are vulnerable to DoS (Denial of
Services) attack. A Denial-of-Service attack (Dos attack) is a
type of attack on a network that is designed to bring network
to its knees by flooding it with useless traffic. In this area,
most researches are based on designing and verifying
various Defence strategies against denial-of-service (DoS)
attacks. A DoS attack characterizes a malicious behaviour
preventing the legitimate users of a network from using the
services provided by that network. Flooding attacks and
Logic attacks are the two principal classes of DoS attack.
Flooding distributed denial of service attacks are the attacks
launched by multiple attackers through the action of
flooding, i.e. sending traffics in a quantity that is able to
bring a network or a service down. Distributed denial of
service (DDoS) flood attacks have been among the most
frequently occurring attacks and badly threaten the
reliability and usability of the services of the Internet.
Hence, DDoS flood attacks (hereafter flood attacks) present
severe threats to individuals, business organizations and
even political entities such as a country. Reported impacts of
DDoS floods include disgruntled customers, losses of
business profits, disruption of critical infrastructures such as
train operations and Internet disconnection of a country from
the outside world .Using UDP for denial-of-service attacks
is not as straightforward as with the Transmission control
protocol (TCP). However, a UDP flood attack can be
initiated by sending a large number of UDP packets to
random ports on a remote host. As a result, the distant host
will:
 Check for the application listening at that port;
 See that no application listens at that port;
 Reply with an ICMP destination unreachable packet.
Thus, for a large number of UDP packets, the victimized
system will be forced into sending many ICMP packets,
eventually leading it to be unreachable by other clients. The
attacker may also spoof the IP address of the UDP packets,
ensuring that the excessive ICMP return packets do not
reach him, and anonym zing the attacker's network
location(s). Most operating systems mitigate this part of the
attack by limiting the rate at which ICMP responses are sent.
A SYN flood attack works by not responding to the server
with the expected ACK code. The malicious client can either
simply not send the expected ACK, or by spoofing the
source IP address in the SYN, causing the server to send the
SYN-ACK to a falsified IP address - which will not send an
ACK because it "knows" that it never sent a SYN. The
server will wait for the acknowledgement for some time, as
simple network congestion could also be the cause of the
missing ACK, but in an attack increasingly large numbers of
half-open connections will bind resources on the server until
no new connections can be made, resulting in a denial of
service to legitimate traffic. Some systems may also
malfunction badly or even crash if other operating system
functions are starved of resources in this way.
Large number of Defences against flooding attack have been
devised which may be reactive or preventive. Mechanisms
such as pushback, trace back, or filtering are reactive
mechanisms which alleviate the impact of flooding attack by
detecting the attack on the victim, but they all have
significant drawbacks that limit their practical utility in the
current scenario. Whereas Preventive strategies make the
victim able to tolerate the attack without the legitimate
user’s request getting denied. Preventive mechanism
enforces restrictive policies such as use of client puzzles that
limits the resource consumption. Generally reactive
mechanisms have some drawbacks. It suffers from
scalability and attack traffic identification problems. Dos can
be effectively beaten by utilizing Client Puzzles. In client
puzzle approach, the client needs to solve the puzzle
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produced by the defender (server) for getting services. The
server produces computational puzzles to client before
committing the resources. Once the sender solves the puzzle
he is allocated the requested resources. The attacker who
intends to use up the defender’s resources by his repeated
requests is deterred from perpetrating the attack, as solving a
puzzle is resource consuming. To preserve the effectiveness
and optimality of this mechanism, the difficulty level of
puzzles should be adjusted in timely manner. Network
puzzles and puzzle auctions tried to adjust difficulty level of
puzzles but they are not much suitable in incorporating this
trade-off. In this paper, we show that Puzzle-based
mechanism can be effectively studied using game theory.
This paper shows Puzzle-based defence mechanism
modelled as two player game, one player as attacker who
perpetrates a flooding attack and other as defender who
counters the attack using client puzzles. Then Nash
equilibrium is applied on game which leads to description of
player’s optimal strategy.
2. Strategic Game Of Client Puzzle
Using the client puzzle approach means that before engaging
in any resource consuming operations, the server first
generates a puzzle and sends its description to the client that
is requesting service from the server. The client has to solve
the puzzle and send the result back to the server. The server
continues with processing the request of the client, only if
the client’s response to the puzzle is correct. This is
summarized in the following abstract.
Protocol, where C and S denote the client and the server,
respectively:
Step 1 C → S: sending service request
Step 2 S: generation of a puzzle
Step 3 S → C: sending description of the puzzle
Step 4 C: solving the puzzle
Step 5 C → S: sending solution to the puzzle
Step 6 S: verification of the solution
If the solution is correct:
Step 7 S: continue processing service request.
One can view the first six steps of the protocol as a preamble
preceding the provision of the service, which is subsumed in
a single step (step 7) in the above abstract description. The
preamble provides a sort of algorithmic protection against
DoS attacks. The server can set the complexity level of the
puzzle according to the estimated strength (computational
resources) of the attacker. If the server manages to set an
appropriate complexity level, then solving the puzzle slows
down the DoS attacker who will eventually abandon his
activity.
2.1 Puzzle characteristics
To prevent DoS attacks, puzzles should have the following
characteristics:
 The computational costs employed by the server in
generating and verifying the puzzles must be significantly
less expensive than the computational costs employed by
the client in solving the puzzles.
 The puzzle difficulty, which depends on the server’s
resources availability, should be easily and dynamically
adjusted during attacks.
 Clients have a limited amount of time to solve puzzles.
 Pre-computing puzzle solutions should be unfeasible.
 Having solved previous puzzles does not aid in solving
new given puzzles.
Before a correct puzzle solution is submitted, the server does
not keep a record of the connection’s state. In addition, Feng
[8] suggests three more factors to be taken into account
when implementing client puzzles. First, the server’s ability
for generating puzzles must not be able to be flooded by the
attacker; in other words, the server should be able to handle
several concurrent requests from clients. Second, when a
puzzle is delivered to a given client, the client must not be
able to circumvent the puzzle mechanism. Third the concept
of fairness is introduced which consists of making puzzles’
difficulty dependable on the clients’ hardware. More
precisely, the author suggests that a “thin client” (cell-phone,
PDA, etc.) should be given less difficult puzzles to solve.
Nevertheless, we believe that this idea of puzzle fairness
should be carefully handled otherwise it could open
opportunities for DoS/ DDoS attacks.
3. Game History And Client-Puzzles
Game theory is the formal study of conflict and lead to
exhaustion of defenders resources as the cooperation. Game
theoretic concepts apply whenever the actions difficulty
level of puzzles; random number generators of and other
parameters are so adjusted to achieve the several agents are
interdependent. These agents may be same, Individuals,
groups, firms or any combination of these. The concepts of
game theory provide a language to formulate structure,
analyze, and understand strategic scenarios.
As a mathematical tool for the decision-maker the strength
of game theory is the methodology it provides for
structuring and analyzing problems of strategic choice. The
process of formally modelling a situation as a game requires
the decision-maker to enumerate explicitly the players and
their strategic options, and to consider their preferences and
reactions.
The discipline involved in constructing such a model already
has the potential of providing the decision-maker with a
clearer and broader view of the situation. This is a
“prescriptive” application of game theory, with the goal of
improved strategic decision making. With this perspective in
mind, this article explains basic principles of game theory,
as an introduction to an interested reader without a
background in economics.
3.1 Strategic and extensive form games
The strategic form (also called normal form) is the basic
type of game studied in no cooperative game theory. A game
in strategic form lists each player’s strategies, and the
outcomes that result from each possible combination of
choices. An outcome is represented by a separate payoff for
each player, which is a number (also called utility) that
Measures how much the player likes the outcome. The
extensive form, also called a game tree, is more detailed
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than the strategic form of a game. It is a complete
description of how the game is played over time.
This includes The order in which players take actions, the
information that players have at the time they must take
those actions, and the times at which any uncertainty in the
situation is resolved. A game in extensive form may be
analyzed directly, or can be converted into an equivalent
strategic form.
This paper uses the concept of Game theory with Nash
equilibrium. Nash equilibrium is a solution concept that
describes a steady state condition of the game; no player
would prefer to change his strategy as that would lower his
payoffs given that all other players are adhering to the
prescribed strategy.
This paper uses the concept of Nash equilibrium in a
prescriptive way rather than only in descriptive way. Use of
Nash equilibrium in prescriptive way does not.
Figure 1: Client Puzzle Approach
Here we calculate each player’s payoff using game theory
concepts. We calculate defender’s payoff and attacker’s
payoff. The payoff is considered through actions QT, RA,
and CA, which stand for quitting (no answer), random
answer to puzzle, and correct answer to the puzzle. It is
assumed that a legitimate user always solves the puzzles and
returns correct answers.
Assume that the defender uses an easy puzzle P1 and a
difficult puzzle P2 to defend him.
αm -> time spend by defender in providing the service.
αpp -> time taken by defender to produce a puzzle.
αVp ->time taken by defender to verify the solution.
αSP1-> expected time of attacker to spend to solve P1.
Defender chooses the puzzles P1 and P2 such that
αSP1 < αm < αSP2
On receiving a puzzle, the attacker may choose from one
among the following actions:
When attacker selects CA for puzzle Pi
Pi: CA = αm + αPP + αV P − αSPi
When attacker selects RA for puzzle Pi
Pi: RA = αm + αPP + αV P
Defender’s Time:
Pi: X = -αPP - αV P - αm + αSPi
We are using four Puzzle-based Defence Mechanism based
on Nash equilibrium. They are Open-Loop Solutions: Open-
loop is history independent solution. PDM1 (Puzzle-based
Defence Mechanism) is derived from the open-loop
defender chooses his actions regardless of what happened in
the game history. The second is Closed-Loop Solutions:
Closed loop is history dependent solution.PDM2 resolves
PDM1problems by using the closed-loop solution concepts,
but it can only defeat a single-source attack. PDM3 extends
PDM2 and deals with distributed attacks. This defence is
based on the assumption that the defender knows the size of
the attack Coalition. PDM4, the ultimate defence mechanism
is proposed in which the size of the attack coalition is
assumed unknown [34].
4. Discussion
The defence mechanism proposed in this paper largely
depends on the quality of the puzzles i.e. how the PDM
levels are used and differentiated using puzzles at
application layer. Moreover the security and maintenance of
database consisting of puzzles at the defenders side is an
important issue which should be considered. In the game
theory approach both the attacker and defender will try to
increase their pay-off and at the same tries to gain more by
reducing the counterpart’s pay-off. The attempt of a
defender will be considered optimum if the pay-off of a
defender; legitimate user is maximum and is minimum for
the attacker. Some other important concepts have been
discussed below: 6.1 Pushback Let us discuss some issues
that may affect the way Pushback [35] could be deployed.
First off, it is fairly obvious that the pushback is most
effective when an attack is non-isotropic; in other words,
there will be routers fairly close to the target where most of
the attack traffic will be arriving from a subset of the input
links. That is a fairly safe assumption; even the biggest
attacks do not involve more than a few thousand
compromised machines, and there are many millions of
machine on the Internet. It would be particularly hard for an
attacker to ensure that the attack slaves are evenly
distributed with respect to the target.
In a Password Cracking [36] attack an attacker tries to gain
unauthorized access to some machine by making repeated
guesses at possible usernames and passwords. Password
guessing can be done remotely with many services; telnet,
ftp, pop, rlogin, and imp are the most prominent services
that support authentication using usernames and passwords.
Dictionary attack is one such type of attack. A Dictionary
attack uses a targeted technique of successively trying all the
words in an exhaustive list called a dictionary which is a
pre-arranged list of values. In contrast with a brute force
attack, where a large proportion key space is searched
systematically, a dictionary attack tries only those
possibilities which are most likely to succeed typically
derived from a list of words for example a dictionary or a
bible etc. Dictionary attacks succeed because many people
have a tendency to choose passwords which are short (7
characters or fewer), single words found in dictionaries or
simple, easily-predicted variations on words, such as
appending a digit.
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5. Conclusion
Game theory has been used in this paper to provide defence
mechanisms for flooding attacks using puzzles. The
interaction between the defender and attacker is considered
as an infinitely repeated game of discounted payoffs. The
mechanism has been divided into different levels. This paper
has also described the architecture of a client puzzle
protocol. The algorithm selected for the client puzzle can be
implemented on almost any platform. For the scenario in
which an attacker carries out a DDoS attack, we modelled
the actions of the attacker as intensities or data rates
employed in carrying out the attack. And to develop a trace
back system that can trace a single packet so that the data of
the whole message is saved and to reduced eavesdropping
risks.
References
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framework for evaluating network resilience against
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[2] W. Sun, X. Kong, D. He, and X. You. Information
security problem research based on game theory.
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[3] T. Aura and P. Nikander. Stateless protocols. In
Proceedings of the ICICS’97 Conference, Springer-
Verlag, LNCS volume 1334, 1997.
[4] B. Bencsath and I. Vajda. Protection against DoS
attacks based on traffic level measurements. Submitted
for publication, April 2003.
[5] CERT Coordination Center, “Denial of Service
Attacks,” Tech Tips, June 4, 2001.
[6] CERT Coordination Center, “TCP SYN Flooding and
IP Spoofing Attacks,” Tech Tips, November 29, 2000.
[7] Dean, D., and Stubblefield, A., Using Client Puzzles to
Protect TLS. In Proceedings of the l0th USENIX
Security Symposium, August 2001.
[8] D. Song and A. Perrig, “Advanced and Authenticated
Marking Schemes for IP Trace back,” Proc. IEEE
INFOCOM ’01, pp. 878-886, 2001.
[9] ShibiaoLin, Tzi-ckerChiueh A Survey on Solutions to
Distributed Denial of Service Attacks
[10]John Ioannidis, Steven M. Bellovin, Implementing
Pushback: Router-Based Defence against DDoS
Attacks.
Author Profile
CH. V. N. Madhuri, M. Tech from JNTUH and B.
Tech from Global Institute of Engineering &
Technology, Moinabad, India
Dr. R. V. Krishnaiah has received Ph. D from JNTU
Ananthapur, M. Tech in CSE from JNTU Hyderabad,
M. Tech in EIE from NIT (former REC) Warangal and
B. Tech in ECE from Bapatla Engineering College. He
has published more than 50 papers in various journals. His interest
includes Data Mining, Software Engineering, and Image
Processing.
Paper ID: 07091301 237

A Defence Strategy against Flooding Attack Using Puzzles by Game Theory

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A Defence Strategy against Flooding Attack Using Puzzles by Game Theory