Characterization and comparison of DDoS attack tools and traffic generators - a review

Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack imposes a severe threat to the extensively used Internet based services like e-commerce, e-banking, transportation, medicine, education etc. Hackers compromises the vulnerable systems for launching DDoS attacks in order to degrade or sometimes completely disrupt such services. In recent years, DDoS attacks have been increased in frequency, sophistication and strength. Though a no. Of solutions have been proposed in literature to combat against DDoS attacks but still defending from a DDoS attack is a challenging issue. Hackers are also continuously upgrading their skills to launch diversified attacks and are developing new sophisticated attack tools and traffic generators to circumvent these countermeasures. The purpose of this paper is to characterize and compare the popular DDoS attack tools and traffic generators used by the attackers in recent times. The technical details provided would surely help the researchers to handpick the appropriate DDoS attack tool and traffic generator for designing their real experiments so that their proposed DDoS defense methods could be validated in a better way.