A strategy for defending against distributed denial of service attacks

Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks are one of the most serious threats facing the Internet today. DDoS attacks overwhelm a system or network by sending large amounts of network traffic, thereby exhausting the target's computational or communication resources. A single attacker, using a DDoS attack tool, is able to direct thousands of systems in a coordinated Denial of Service (DoS) attack against a target system.; In this thesis, we developed three DDoS resistant network architectures. These DDoS resistant network architectures were designed to: (1) secure the network against participation in a DDoS attack, and (2) maintain mission critical service delivery while a DDoS victim. In this study, the DDoS resistant network architectures are achieved by developing a strategy that utilized two distinct but related approaches: layered network security and survivability. Additionally, this study provides a comparative analysis of two DDoS tools: TFN2K and Plague.