Heuristic Methods for the Mitigation of DDoS Attacks that Abuse TCP Protocol

TCP SYN Flood is one of the most wide-spread DoS attack types used on computer networks nowadays. As a possible countermeasure, this thesis proposes a network-based mitigation method TCP Reset Cookies. The method utilizes the TCP three-way-handshake mechanism to establish a security association with a client before forwarding its SYN data. The algorithm can effectively mitigate even more sophisticated SYN flood attacks at the cost of 1-second delay for the first established connection. However, the method may not be suitable for all the scenarios, so decision-making algorithm to switch between different SYN Flood mitigation methods according to discovered traffic patterns was also developed. The project was conducted as a part of security research by CESNET. The discussed implementation of TCP Reset Cookies is already integrated into a DDoS protection solution deployed in CESNET's backbone network and Czech Internet exchange point at NIX.CZ