Adaptive Probabilistic Packet Marking Scheme for IP Traceback

IP Traceback is a fundamental mechanism in defending against cyber-attacks in particular the denial of service (DoS) attacks. Many schemes have been proposed in the literature; in particular, Probabilistic Packet Marking (PPM) schemes were in the center of the researchers' attention given their scalability and thus their ability to trace distributed attacks such as distributed denial of service attacks (DDoS). A major issue in PPM-based schemes is the fixed marking probability, which reduces the probability of getting marked packets from routers far away from the victim given that their marked packets have a higher probability to be re-marked by routers near the victim. This increases the number of packets required to reconstruct the attack path. In this paper, we propose a simple, yet efficient solution for this issue by letting the routers adapt their marking probability based on the number of packets they have previously re-marked. We compare our scheme to the original PPM through extensive simulations. The results clearly show the improvement brought by our proposed marking scheme.