Protecting Web Servers from Distributed Denial of Service Attacks

Abstract: Recently many prominent websites faced the Distributed Denial of Service (DDOS) attacks. While former security threats could be faced by tight security policy and measures like using firewalls, vendor patches etc. These DDOS are new in such a way that there is no completely satisfying protection as yet. There are certain solutions based on class based routing mechanisms in the LINUX kernel which prevent most severe impacts of DDOS. However, these do not provide complete security to the web server and hence there is a need to focus on other defence mechanisms. That is why we propose to introduce a concept called Honeypot in which we create a proxy server so as to lure attackers. In this system we can identify the attacker and can be notified immediately.

Keywords: LINUX kernel, Distributed Denial of Service (DDOS) attacks, Web Servers.