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Classification of UDP Traffic for DDoS Detection

UDP traffic has recently been used extensively in flooding-based distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks, most notably by those launched by the Anonymous group. Despite extensive past research in the general area of DDoS detection/prevention, the industry still lacks effective tools to deal with DDoS attacks leveraging UDP traffic. This paper presents our investigation into the proportional-packet rate assumption, and the use of this criterion to classify UDP traffic with the goal of detecting malicious addresses that launch flooding-based UDP DDoS attacks. We conducted our experiments on data from a large number of production networks including large corporations (edge and core), ISPs, universities, financial institutions, etc. In addition, we also conducted experiments on the DETER testbed as well as a testbed of our own. All the experiments indicate that proportional-packet rate assumption generally holds for benign UDP traffic and can be used as a reasonable criterion to differentiate DDoS and non-DDoS traffic. We designed and implemented a prototype classifier based on this criterion and discuss how it can be used to effectively thwart UDP-based flooding attacks.