Performance
of Windows XP, Windows Vista and Apple’s
Leopard Computers under a Denial of Service Attack
SUMMARY
Abstract Distributed Denial of Service (DDOS)
attacks are increasing over the Internet. DDOS attacks were launched on servers
belonging to US and South Korean government. DDOS attacks are now considered a
prominent threat to the internet. ICMP is used to diagnose and report any error
in a network. ICMP is used by a user to verify the end to end Internet Path
operation, where ICMP Echo Reply packet to confirm that host is alive in the
network. IP Spoofing forms a platform for larger of DOS attacks.
When a victim computer is flooded with ICMP Echo
Requests having identical source and destination IP addresses, the victim
computer replies to itself for all Echo requests it receives. The exhaustion of
computing resources was recorded and compared for each operating system.
Window XP and Window Vista under ICMP based Land
Attack on the computer system. Window XP consumes a fixed amount of main
memory.
Window XP is more robust and more capable of
withstanding the DDOS attacks compared to Apple’s Leopard and Windows Vista
operating systems. Window Vista to crash at 30Mbps load attack was primarily
due to depletion of available space in the main memory. Windows XP operating
system was able to limit the processor exhaustion to a maximum of 50%
utilization and help survive DDOS attack.
