SDToW: A Slowloris Detecting Tool for WMNs

Abstract

Denial of service (DoS) attacks play a significant role in contemporary cyberspace scenarios. A variety of different DoS attacks pollute networks by exploring various vulnerabilities. A group of DoS called application DoS attacks explore application vulnerabilities. This work presents a tool that detects and blocks an application DoS called Slowloris on wireless mesh networks (WMNs). Our tool, called SDToW, is designed to effectively use the structure of the WMNs to block the Slowloris attack. SDToW uses three different modules to detect and block the attack. Each module has its specific tasks and thus optimizes the overall detection and block efficiency. Our solution blocks the attacker on its first WMN hop, reducing the malicious traffic on the network and avoiding further attacks from the blocked user. The comparison results show that SDToW performs with 66.7% less processing consumption and 89.1% less memory consumption than Snort. Our solution does not limit the number of parallel connections per user. Hence, by avoiding this limitation, SDToW has a lower incidence of false positive errors than Snort.