Securing wireless mobile nodes from distributed denial-of-service attacks

The current mobile devices have become smart and are increasingly being used for conducting business and personal activities. Also, there is increasing number of attacks targeting such mobile devices. The term mobile botnet refers to group of mobile devices that are compromised and controlled by the attacker that can be used for generating distributed denial-of-service attacks. The security protocols that have been proposed for wireless and mobile networks have several weaknesses that can be exploited by the attacker to obtain unauthorized access and generate attacks. Also, there is growing number of malicious applications that are aimed to compromise smartphones and using them for generating different types of attacks. In this paper, we propose techniques to counteract distributed denial-of-service attacks on wireless mobile devices. We describe the operation and architectural components of our model. We will show that our model is able to efficiently deal with the attacks by dropping the attack traffic before it targets the victim mobile node, can prevent the attack traffic at the upstream nodes, and also deal with the attack cases that involve mobility of the attacking and victim nodes. Copyright (C) 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.