A Comparative Study of Defense Mechanisms against SYN Flooding Attack

Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) flooding attacks are a serious threat to the security of the internet. A DDoS attack makes a machine or network resources not usable by the legitimate clients. A SYN flood is a form of denial-of-service attack. An attacker sends SYN requests continuously to a target system to consume enough server resources and to make the system unable to respond to legitimate traffic. It is a threat to the network as the flooding of packets may delay other legitimate users from accessing the server and in severe cases may result the server to be shut down, wasting valuable resources. The objective of this paper is to review the detection mechanisms for SYN flooding. The advantages and disadvantages for some detection schemes are examined and their performance is compared