Analysis and protection of networks from crossfire attacks

Abstract

Most part of examined assaults in Computer security or Network security are based on Crossfire Attacks and it is a critical concern for most of the Cyber Security experts. The attacker primarily focusses on the termination and degradation of the network connections for a selected target which is a server in this context. In crossfire attack, a set of bots starts damaging servers by flooding only few primary nodes in the network. These attacks are different from the DDOS attacks in quite few aspects otherwise it is common. The attacker here affects set of bots and he does not spoof the IP address unlike in the DDOS, and the flooding is done with very low intensity, rather than in a fast pace, DDOS packets can be filtered by packet filters. In this paper, we present a broad audit of Crossfire Attacks to arrange and dissect the Crossfire Attack assaults scope on topologies. We considered the TCP/IP reference model and Crossfire Attacks assaults are grouped depending on different parameters and different topologies, for example, the attack time and performance may be different for a Mesh topology and a Star topology based on the path between nodes, having same number of nodes. The current countermeasures are overviewed. The paper arranges Crossfire Attacks assaults into four modules i.e., topology, no. of bots, time taken to isolate a node, ideal topology. At last, we present counteractive action systems for every single such assault and furthermore distinguish couple of future research bearings.