Developments in DoS Research and Mitigating Technologies

This paper is a survey on the problem of denial of service attacks and the proposed ways to defend against them. Of particular concern are the distributed attacks that an adversary can carry out by recruiting innocent targets to aid the attack. Since attacks come in many forms and shapes and are generally easy to carry out given the free availability of tools such as Trinoo, defense is difficult because the line between legitimate and unauthorized traffic cannot be drawn precisely. We describe the current state of facts that allows DoS attacks and the potential mitigation technologies.