A Discrete Event Simulator for Extensive Defense Mechanism for Denial of Service Attacks Analysis

Abstract

Problem statement: Seeking for defense mechanisms against low rate Denial of Service (DoS) attacks as a new generation of DoS attacks has received special attention during recent years. As a decisive factor, evaluating the performance of the offered mitigation techniques based on different metrics for determining the viability and ability of these countermeasures requires more research. Approach: The development of a new generalized discrete event simulator has been deliberated in detail. The research conducted places high emphasis on the benefits of creating a customized discrete event simulator for the analysis of security and in particular the DoS attacks. The simulator possesses a niche in terms of the small scale, low execution time, portability and ease of use. The attributes and mechanism of the developed simulator is complemented with the proposed framework. Results: The simulator has been extensively evaluated and has proven to provide an ideal tool for the analysis and exploration of DoS attacks. In-depth analysis is enabled by this simulator for creating multitudes of defense mechanisms against HTTP low rate DoS attacks. The acquired results from the simulation tool have been compared against a simulator from the same domain. Subsequently, it enables the validation of developed simulator utilizing selected performance metrics including mean in-system time, average delay and average buffer size. Conclusion: The proposed simulator serves as an efficient and scalable performance analysis tool for the analysis of HTTP low rate DoS attack defense mechanism. Future work can encompass the development of discrete event simulators for analysis of other security issues such as Intrusion Detection Systems.