Towards Detecting Target Link Flooding Attack

A new class of target link flooding attacks (LFA) can cut off the Internet connections of a target area without being detected because they employ legitimate flows to congest selected links. Although new mechanisms for defending against LFA have been proposed, the deployment issues limit their usages since they require modifying routers. In this paper, we propose LinkScope, a novel system that employs both the end-to-end and the hop-by-hop network measurement techniques to capture abnormal path performance degradation for detecting LFA and then correlate the performance data and traceroute data to infer the target links or areas. Although the idea is simple, we tackle a number of challenging issues, such as conducting large-scale Internet measurement through noncooperative measurement, assessing the performance on asymmetric Internet paths, and detecting LFA. We have implemented LinkScope with 7174 lines of C codes and the extensive evaluation in a testbed and the Internet show that LinkScope can quickly detect LFA with high accuracy and low false positive rate.