A Hybrid Messaging-Based Scheme for IP Traceback

IP traceback is one of the main challenges that face the security of today's Internet. Many techniques were proposed, including in-band messaging and out-of-band messaging; each of them has pros and cons. In this paper, we propose a new traceback scheme that mixes these two techniques in order to achieve the best of the two worlds. Our hybrid messaging scheme uses packet marking (an in-band messaging scheme) to include signaling information in forwarded IP packets, while out-of-band messaging is used as a complementary signaling part in the case of randomly spoofed IP packets. The evaluation of the proposed scheme against various performance metrics and through extensive simulation studies showed that the scheme is able to trace a single packet across several and even non-cooperative domains, with a reasonable amount of storage, processing and bandwidth overhead.