Characteristics Comparison between Carpet Bombing-type and Single Target DRDoS Attacks Observed by Honeypot

Abstract

Carpet bombing-type DDoS attacks targeting a wide-range network rather than a single IP address have threatened the Internet. Some researchers have investigated the characteristics of single-target DDoS attacks. Still, much less is known about the characteristics of carpet bombing, even the differences between them. In this paper, we profile characteristics of carpet bombing via data from amplification DDoS honeypots and the differences between single-target DRDoS attacks and carpet bombing. We analyze attacks highly concentrated on a specific network on victims, duration, number of packets, ports, and TTLs, and describe the differences between single-target DRDoS attacks and carpet bombing. Our analysis at the level of Autonomous Systems demonstrates that carpet bombing attacks target more hosting networks, including some critical targets, than single-target attacks. We found carpet bombing attacks targeting more “Corporate” networks. We also found that each IP address targeted by carpet bombing receives fewer packets than single-target DRDoS attacks. According to the result of the comparison of attack duration and TTL, carpet bombing lasted longer and referred to having diverse values of TTL in the packets. On the contrary, most single-target DRDoS attacks have a single value of TTL in the packets. This implies carpet bombing has a higher probability of originating from multiple sources. Finally, comparing ports shows that using various ports for Carpet Bombing is highly proportional to single-target DRDoS attacks.