TITLE:
Apple’s Lion vs Microsoft’s Windows 7: Comparing Built-In Protection against ICMP Flood Attacks
AUTHORS:
Rodolfo Baez Junior, Sanjeev Kumar
KEYWORDS:
Denial of Service (DOS) Attack, Echo Request, Echo Reply, Internet Control Message Protocol (ICMP), Land Attack, Operating System (OS), Ping Attack
JOURNAL NAME:
Journal of Information Security,
Vol.5 No.3,
July
24,
2014
ABSTRACT:
With the increase in the
number of computers connected to Internet, the number of Distributed Denial of
Service (DDoS) attacks has also been increasing. A DDoS attack consumes the
computing resources of a computer or a server, by degrading its computing
performance or by preventing legitimate users from accessing its services.
Recently, Operating Systems (OS) are increasingly deploying embedded DDoS
prevention schemes to prevent computing exhaustion caused by such attacks. In
this paper, we compare the effectiveness of two popular operating systems,
namely the Apple’s Lion and Microsoft’s Windows 7, against DDoS attacks. We
compare the computing performance of these operating systems under two ICMP
based DDoS attacks. Since the role of the OS is to manage the computer or
servers resources as efficiently as possible, in this paper we investigate
which OS manages its computing resources more efficiently. In this paper, we
evaluate and compare the built-in security of these two operating systems by
using an iMac computer which is capable of running both Windows 7 and Lion. The
DDoS attacks that are simulated for this paper are the ICMP Ping and Land
Attack. For this experiment, we measure the exhaustion of the processors and
the number of Echo Request and Echo Reply messages that were generated under varying
attack loads for both the Ping and Land Attack. From our experiments, we found
that both operating systems were able to survive the attacks however they
reacted a bit differently under attack. The Operating System Lion was handling
both the Ping and Land attack in the exactly the same way, whereas Windows 7
handled the two attacks a bit differently, resulting in different processor
consumptions by two different operating systems.