Efficiency of using mobile agents to trace multiple sources of attack

Recently, network resource has become extremely vulnerable to denial of service (DoS) and distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks, which have become a pressing problem due to scarcity of an efficient method to locate the real attacker. Especially, as network topology becomes more advanced and complex, IP traceback is difficult but necessary. For protection against DoS/DDoS even partial information about the attack path is useful as it allows to throttle such attacks at distant router. Existing traceback mechanisms have serious drawbacks such as high false positive, enormous storage requirements at routers, and huge additional network traffic. As such, we make use of mobile agents for real-time traceback of multiple attack sources. The mobile agent traceback scheme presented in [2] and the proposed improvement in this paper are not only efficient as compared to other existing schemes but also has the following advantages: it is flexible, autonomous, lightweight and protocol-independent which makes it particularly suitable for the Internets' varieties of the network topology and protocols.