A reference model for identification of significant features of smurf attacks in wireless networks

Lack of accurate and quantitative information related to smurf attack field makes it impossible to measure severity of the attack, quantify success of proposed defenses, and compare their performance. Therefore, development of models capable of quantifying the impact of the attack in simulation and also testbed experiments can lead to development of defenses tools to accurately block the attack. To the best of our knowledge, this work is the first attempt to develop a model to quantify the consequences of the smurf attacks on performance of the wireless networks. Hence, the primary contribution of this work is development of a comprehensive smurf-based attack model. We further investigate the factors that mainly contribute to the amplification of the smurf attack traffics and determine the relation among the original attack traffic, intermediate unprotected network, and the final amplified smurf attack traffic. The model involves a variety of experiments which run against real wireless network testbed in addition to a simulation environment using NS2. The testbed results are compared against the simulation results to verify the validity of the model.

Keywords:

smurf attack , wireless testbed , attack simulation , NS2 , cyber attacks