Denial of Service Due to Direct and Indirect ARP Storm Attacks in LAN Environment

Sanjeev Kumar, Orifiel Gomez

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DOI: 10.4236/jis.2010.12010                

Abstract

ARP-based Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks due to ARP-storms can happen in local area networks where many computer systems are infected by worms such as Code Red or by DDoS agents. In ARP attack, the DDoS agents constantly send a barrage of ARP requests to the gateway, or to a victim computer within the same sub-network, and tie up the resource of attacked gateway or host. In this paper, we set to measure the impact of ARP-attack on resource exhaustion of computers in a local area network. Based on attack experiments, we measure the exhaustion of processing and memory resources of a victim computer and also other computers, which are located on the same network as the victim computer. Interestingly enough, it is observed that an ARP-attack not only exhausts resource of the victim computer but also significantly exhausts processing resource of other non-victim computers, which happen to be located on the same local area network as the victim computer.

Keywords

ARP Attack, Computer Network Security, Computer Systems, Direct Attack, Distributed Denial of Service Attacks (DDoS), Indirect Attack, Local Area Networks

Conflicts of Interest

The authors declare no conflicts of interest.

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