Design of system on chip for generating SYN flood attack to test the performance of the security system

Abstract

DDoS attack is generated by the attacker on the server, so that the genuine clients will not have access to the services provided by server. To protect servers from such attacks, large variety of security systems are available. The best security system can be selected by comparing the performance of these systems. There is a need to generate attacks at very high speed to test the performance of security system. This manuscript presents the design of FPGA based reconfigurable hardware System-on-Chip (SoC), that can generate the SYN flood attacks at high speed in real time. The SoC SYN flood attack is implemented using the soft core NIOS II processor, Triple_Speed Ethernet, etc. The manuscript also compares the attacks generated using such hardware based SoC SYN flood attacker with the SYN flood attacks generated using purely software based tool hping3. It is found that the attacks generated using FPGA based system is much faster than software based tool. The same hardware design can be used to generate many different types of attacks such as spoofed, non-spoofed, layer 3 , layer 4 attacks like TCP flood attack, UDP attack, ICMP flood attack, TCP SYN-ACK attack, TCP FIN-ACK attack, etc. Such attacks are essential to benchmark the security systems. The proposed technique can be used as industry standard to benchmark the performance of the security systems.