Extracting Low-Rate DDoS Attack Characteristics: The Case of Multipath TCP-Based Communication Networks

The multipath TCP (MPTCP) enables multihomed mobile devices to realize multipath parallel transmission, which greatly improves the transmission performance of the mobile communication network. With the rapid development of all kinds of emerging technologies, network attacks have shown a trend of development with many types and rapid updates. Among them, low-rate distributed denial of service (LDDoS) attacks are considered to be one of the most threatening issues in the field of network security. In view of the current research status, by using the network simulation software NS2, this paper first compares and analyzes the throughput and delay performance of the MPTCP transmission system under LDDoS attacks and, further, conducts simulation experiments and analysis on the queue occupancy rate of the LDDoS attack flow to extract the basic attack characteristics of the LDDoS attacks. The experimental results show that the LDDoS attacks will have a major destructive effect on the throughput performance and delay performance of the MPTCP transmission system, resulting in a decrease in the robustness of the transmission system. By analyzing and comparing the occupancy rate of the LDDoS attack flow in the MPTCP transmission system, it can be concluded that (1) the occupancy rate of the LDDoS scattered pulse traffic sent by each puppet machine changes slightly, and (2) the occupancy rate of LDDoS attack data flow is much greater than that of ordinary TCP data flow.