Unified Rate Limiting in Broadband Access Networks for Defeating Internet Worms and DDoS Attacks

Internet worms and DDoS attacks are considered the two most menacing attacks on today’s Internet. The traditional wisdom is that they are different beasts, and they should be dealt with independently. In this paper, however, we show that a unified rate limiting algorithm is possible, which effectively works on both Internet worms and DDoS attacks. The unified approach leads to higher worm traffic reduction performance than that of existing rate limiting schemes geared toward worm mitigation, in addition to the added advantage of dropping most DDoS attack packets. In our experiments with attack traffics generated by attacking tools, the unified rate limiting scheme drops 80.7% worm packets and 93% DDoS packets, while 69.2% worms and 3.4% DDoS packets are dropped at maximum by previous worm scan rate limiting schemes. Also, the proposed scheme requires less computing resources, and has higher accuracy for dropping attack packets but not dropping legitimate packets.