Evaluation of Current State of Amplification-Based Ddos Attacks Bohte, Edgar; Stamatogiannakis, Manolis; Bos, Herbert
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VU Research Portal Evaluation of current state of amplification-based DDoS attacks Bohte, Edgar; Stamatogiannakis, Manolis; Bos, Herbert 2018 document version Publisher's PDF, also known as Version of record document license Unspecified Link to publication in VU Research Portal citation for published version (APA) Bohte, E. (Author), Stamatogiannakis, M. (Other), & Bos, H. (Other). (2018). Evaluation of current state of amplification-based DDoS attacks. 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Sep. 2021 Evaluation of current state of amplification-based DDoS attacks Edgar Bohte Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, The Netherlands [email protected] TABLE I: Protocol, its assigned port, the bandwidth amplification Abstract—Amplification-based DDoS attacks are still a big factor and the current status. threat to the availability of the internet. In quite some time there is no new paper published that gave an update on the current Protocol Port Bandwidth Amplification Factor Status state of amplification DDoS attacks, taken into consideration it was a huge problem a few years ago. We performed multiple QOTD 17 140.3 Legacy scans of the whole IPv4 address space and deployed two honey- CHARGEN 19 358.8 Legacy pots to monitor amplification DDoS attacks to make a picture of DNS 53 28 to 54 Active the current state of amplification DDoS attacks. From the scan NTP 123 556.9 Active RIP 520 131.24 Deprecated data and the honeypot data, we can conclude that NTP is the MSSQL 1434 8 Active most dangerous protocol, for these kinds of attacks. Furthermore, SSDP/UPnP 1900 30.8 Active China and The United States are the most targeted countries for amplification DDoS attacks. The bandwidth amplification factor shows the potential effect of ADDoS attack and can be calculated by the payload in bytes sent I. INTRODUCTION for a request against that of the payload in bytes of the response. Recently, in March 2018, a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack achieved an unprecedented throughput of 1.7 Tbps [1]. To achieve this kind of throughput, the attackers used instrumenting the attack. Although a reflection attack is almost a DDoS technique know as Amplification. These particular the same as an ADDOS attack the responses of protocols do kinds of DDoS attacks can be categorized under the broader not need to be larger than the request it just needs to reflect group of Reflection DDoS attacks. An Akamai study has shown the request. Figure1 shows how an ADDoS attack works. that Reflection DDoS attacks have increased both in size and In this paper, we will look at the current state of ADDoS frequency from 2014 till this day [2]. attacks. In the first part of our study, we will set up a honeypot, In principle, an Amplification DDoS (ADDoS) attack ex- which will run services that can be used in ADDoS attacks. ploits one or more connectionless (i.e. UDP-based) protocols A honeypot is a closely monitored, network-connected decoy that accept small requests and produce responses orders of host. It is expected to be broken into by unsuspecting attackers, magnitude larger in size. The connectionless nature of these so we can get to study their methods. Since the system does protocols makes them available for exploitation, as the source not get used in a legitimate way, every connection to it is of the request can be spoofed in order to redirect the large suspicious. When deployed, honeypots can keep the focus off response to the selected target. Because of the spoofing, it important machines on a network, it works as an early warning is also very hard for the target to identify who is actually against new attacks and identifies new attack trends. They can also be used for an in-depth examination during and after exploitation of the honeypot [3]. Our study will focus on seven UDP based protocols which are prone to ADDoS exploitation: • Quote Of The Day (QOTD) • Character Generator (CHARGEN) • Domain Name System (DNS) • Network Time Protocol (NTP) • Routing Information Protocol v1 (RIPV1/RIP) • Microsoft SQL (MSSQL) • Simple Service Discovery Protocol/Universal Plug and Play (SSDP/UPnP1) TableI[4][5] shows the typical amplification factor achieved by each of these protocols as well as their use status. The specific seven protocols were selected because we would like our results to be comparable with those of Krupp et Fig. 1: Illustration of an Amplification DDoS. The attacker host 1UPnP is a collection of networking protocols used to find and connect sends small spoofed requests to different UDP-based services. This devices with each other over the network. For discovery, UPnP uses the SSDP results in large responses being directed against the victim host. protocol. We will simply use SSDP for further references to these protocols. al. [6]. The Virtual Machines (VMs) ran a program called will only provide a maximum of 3 packets per IP address. This AmpPot [7] to let them act like honeypots. We chose to use contribution is minuscule in comparison to the sizes of these AmpPot because it is an easy way to set up a honeypot and attacks that we can not be held accountable for it. It is possible it gives a more precisely comparison with data from earlier to change the limit of requests per hour, but for the purpose performed research in this field. of this study, it was not necessary. Although we deployed In the second part of our study, we scanned the whole IPv4 AmpPot on more IP addresses than the original study [7], the address space for hosts running the seven protocols we focus contribution of our servers is still in the low kilobit bandwidth on. These scans have been performed using a program called size while most ADDoS attacks get a Gigabit per second ZMap [8]. To get an estimate of the number of servers that bandwidth size. can be used in an ADDoS attack. 1) Common honeypot configuration: We ran the Amp- Using the two parts of our study, we can get an up-to-date Pot code on two different VMs; one VM was provided by estimate of the current state of ADDoS attacks: the scan results SURFnet [9] and the other one by GRnet [10]. The config- give us an indication of the number of servers that can be uration of the two honeypots was identical, with a couple of abused and the honeypot data allow us to see the frequency of minor differences related to the setup of our hosting providers. ADDoS attacks. To summarize, the contributions of this paper AmpPot can be run in three different modes: Emulated, Proxy are as follows: and Agnostic. First, the Emulated mode, this mode will check • We ran a honeypot to show how many people are still if the request is valid and if so it will respond with a pre- using seven specific UDP-based protocols for ADDoS generated protocol-specific response. Secondly, there is the attacks. Proxy mode, ”The proxy mode turns AmpPot into a proxy • We performed a scan of the whole IPv4 address space to that forwards requests to internal servers that actually operate see how many IP addresses ran these seven protocols. the vulnerable protocol” [7]. At last, the Agnostic mode, this The structure of this paper is as follows. First, we will mode always replies with a response 100x the requests size or look at how we performed the data collection of the hon- with the maximum MTU, even if the request is invalid for a eypots (Section II-A) and how the scans were performed protocol. We ran both servers on the Emulated mode because (Section II-B). In Section III we will look at all the results the Agnostic mode always replies, even if the request is invalid obtained from both the scans (Section III-B) and the honeypots for a protocol. For this research, we are interested in what kind (Section III-A). In SectionIV we will look further into of protocols will be used in ADDoS attacks. Thus, if we would interesting results (Section IV-A) and analyse what could have always reply with a large request the probability is bigger it been done differently in this presented research (Section IV-B). will be used in ADDoS attacks, and this has nothing to do Furthermore, future research in this field will be considered with the abuse-ability of the protocol itself. The Emulated (Section IV-C). In SectionV we will look at research already mode also made it possible to compare our results with those done in this area. In the end, a conclusion of this research will of Krupp et al. [6]. Furthermore, it is possible to change the be givenVI. response rate of the server. This value was set to 0.5 in this research, this means that the server will only send a response II.