System for DDoS attack mitigation by discovering the attack vectors through statistical traffic analysis

DDoS attacks are becoming an increasing threat to the internet due to the easy availability of user-friendly attack tools. In meantime defending from such attacks is very difficult, because it is very hard to differentiate between the legitimate traffic and attack traffic and also maintain the attacked service still accessible while under attack. This paper describes a method for discovering the vector of a DDoS attack using statistical traffic analysis. The discussed methods are based on having a notification of the attack and making a statistical analysis of the attack traffic to find the vector and profiling a statistical baseline of normal traffic and discovering the abnormal traffic as a difference in the statistical parameters of TCP/IP packets in a given moment to the baseline and thus making a decision of the attack and its vector simultaneously.