PhD in UDP flood Attack & Mitigation

UDP Flood or User Datagram Protocol flood can be defined as the communication protocol which threatens the IoT network at large. It acts as a service denial attack sent to a device to make it unresponsive or lose its ability to process such requests. The device's firewall (victim's device) tends to get exhausted by continuously processing such legitimate service-denial requests, thus giving the attacker an opportunity to attack the victim's device.

The UDP attack does not require lot of efforts from the attacker, thereby making it comparatively easier to perform. A UDP attack behavior is when a victim's device is continuously flooded with unplanned UDP (IP) packets that are spread over random ports of the victim's device. In response to this attack, the victim's device tries to find an application attached or involved with such packets. Upon failure to do so it returns an ICMP (Destination Unreachable) Protocol.

When the user or victim keeps on receiving such return ICMP constantly, the device becomes unresponsive to even authentic requests sent by other devices.

In order to mitigate the UDP flood attack, it is imminent to limit the rate at which the error (ICMP) messages are generated on the user/victim's device or machine. Various OS (operating systems) and technologically advanced routers already have an existing feature that enables them to implement rate limiting of ICMP messages, but currently such feature is missing in Internet of Things networks. This calls for a planned course of action to tactically handle overall DDoS attacks.

The proposed solution to overcome the threat of UDP flood Attacks on the IoT networks is to mitigate the rate at which Service denial requests are generated.

In order to do so, it is proposed to develop an algorithm which will enable reduction of the UDP flood attack along the Internet of Things Network. At present, the Contiki has no such algorithm that would limit the rate of ICMP messages generation.

The proposed algorithm would not only help to limit the response error (ICMP messages) by the nodes, it would also help in reducing energy consumption making the system more efficient.

In order to limit the DDoS attacks on the whole, and in view of the upcoming IoT architecture, protocol and technologies, it becomes imperative to form a framework to limit the UDP flood attacks.

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