Active Cache Based Defense against DoS Attacks in Wireless Mesh Network

Wireless mesh network (WMN) is evolving to be a new paradigm for wireless Internet connectivity as it obviates the need for wired infrastructure at every access point (AP) a.k.a mesh router (MR). The MRs collaboratively forward the traffic towards the Internet gateway (IGW). The self-configurable architecture of MRs paves way for malicious intruders to conduct a denial-of-service attack (DoS) on the MRs by flooding the network with a large volume of traffic; thus rendering the system inaccessible to the real users. In this paper, we present a cache based defense at the MRs to identify flooding style DoS attacks. We use a most frequently used cache mechanism to identify such flows and raise an early alert to curb them. We effectively avert any performance degradation by dropping the identified attack flows along the forwarding routers. Simulation results indicate that our scheme offers an active line of defense against DoS attacks