Traffic-adaptive packet filtering of denial of service attacks

Traffic-adaptive packet filtering is a mechanism to adjust packet classification methods at run-time to the particular traffic mix a network node is receiving. It has been conjectured previously that such techniques could perform positively when filtering out malicious attack traffic, due to their flow aggregation capabilities. In this work, we present two novel contributions-a first ever working implementation of a traffic adaptive firewall, based on insertion of shortcuts into a search tree, and both a simulated and a real-life performance study of adaptive packet filtering under denial-of-service attack traffic, the outcomes of which support the above conjecture.