Multiple probabilistic packet marking (PPM) schemes for IP traceback have been proposed to deal with Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks by reconstructing their attack graphs and identifying the attack sources. In this paper, ten PPM-based IP traceback schemes are compared and analyzed in terms of features such as convergence time, performance evaluation, underlying topologies, incremental deployment, re-marking, and upstream graph. Our analysis shows that the considered schemes exhibit a significant discrepancy in performance as well as performance assessment. We concisely demonstrate this by providing a table showing that (a) different metrics are used for many schemes to measure their performance and, (b) most schemes are evaluated on different classes of underlying network topologies. Our results reveal that both the value and arrangement of the PPM-based scheme convergence times vary depending on exactly the underlying network topology. As a result, this paper shows that a side-by-side comparison of the scheme performance a complicated and turns out to be a crucial open problem in this research area.
This paper describes a technique for tracing anonymous packet flooding attacks in the Internet back towards their source. This work is motivated by the increased frequency and sophistication of denial-of-service attacks and by the difficulty in tracing packets with incorrect, or spoofed'', source addresses. In this paper we describe a general purpose traceback mechanism based on probabilistic packet marking in the network. Our approach allows a victim to identify the network path(s) traversed by attack traffic without requiring interactive operational support from Internet Service Providers (ISPs). Moreover, this traceback can be performed post-mortem'' -- after an attack has completed. We present an implementation of this technology that is incrementally deployable, (mostly) backwards compatible and can be efficiently implemented using conventional technology.