IP Traceback - Trace-back of Active Attack Flows

Trace-back of Active Attack Flows

In this type of solution, an observer tracks an existing attack flow by examining incoming and outgoing ports on routers starting from the host under attack. Thus, such a solution requires having privileged access to routers along the attack path.

To bypass this restriction and automate this process, Stone proposes routing suspicious packets on an overlay network using ISP edge routers. By simplifying the topology, suspicious packets can easily be re-routed to a specialized network for further analysis.

This is an interesting approach. By nature of DoS, any such attack will be sufficiently long lived for tracking in such a fashion to be possible. Layer-three topology changes, while hard to mask to a determined attacker, have the possibility of alleviating the DoS until the routing change is discovered and subsequently adapted to. Once the attacker has adapted, the re-routing scheme can once again adapt and re-route; causing an oscillation in the DoS attack; granting some ability to absorb the impact of such an attack.