ColShield: an effective and collaborative protection shield for the detection and prevention of collaborative flooding of DDoS attacks in wireless mesh networks

Abstract

AbstractWireless mesh networks are highly susceptible to Distributed Denial-of-Service attacks due to its self-configuring property. Flooding DDOS attack is one form of collaborative attacks and the transport layer of such networks are extremely affected. In this paper we propose ColShield, an effective and collaborative protection shield which not only detects flooding attacks but also prevents the flooding attacks through clever spoof detection. ColShield consists of Intrusion Protection and Detection Systems (IPDS) located at various points in the network which collaboratively defend flooding attacks. ColShield detects the attack node and its specific port number under attack. In order to reduce the burden on a single global IPDS, the system uses several local IPDS for the collaborative mitigation of flooding attacks. The evaluation of ColShield is done using extensive simulations and is proved to be effective in terms of false positive ratio, packet delivery ratio, communication overhead and attack detection time.