What are Anti-Spoofing Techniques? How are They Used to Stop DDoS Attacks?


What is Spoofing?

Spoofing is a type of online assault in which cyber attackers alter the address or source of a packet to make it appear as if it came from a trustworthy source. Enterprises set up routers, firewalls, and gateways to identify fake or spoofed packets. These devices are responsible for inspecting each incoming packet and verifying its origins. Anti-spoofing is a method of detecting packets with incorrect addresses.

Spoofing usually consists of two parts: the spoof itself such as a forged email or website, and the social engineering component, which encourages the victims to act. A successful spoofing assault can result in serious consequences such as the theft of personal or company information, the harvesting of credentials for use in future attacks, the transmission of malware, illegal network access, or the bypassing of access controls.

What is Anti-Spoofing?

Anti-spoofing is a strategy that focuses on identifying and stopping packets with incorrect, faked, or forged source addresses. This is accomplished by assigning a firewall rule to the interface that connects the firewall to the system. Each incoming packet is identified by the firewall rule, which then examines the source addresses of packets that come into contact with the interface.

The goal is to prevent attackers from unfairly taking advantage of the network by using a faked IP address.

Anti-spoofing is a network security feature implemented by Internet Service Providers (ISPs) or network operators. The infrastructure includes a mechanism that can validate the source address; this is done to prevent spammed or spoofed packets with wrong IP addresses from entering or leaving the network.

Anti-Spoofing Techniques

Following are some anti-spoofing techniques −

Facial Anti-Spoofing

The task of avoiding fraudulent facial verification by utilizing a photo, video, mask, or another substitute for an authorized person's face is known as facial anti-spoofing.

  • Attack on replay/video − A more advanced method of deceiving the system usually necessitates a looped video of the victim's face.

  • The attacker utilizes someone's photo in a print attack. The image is printed or seen on a computer screen.

Anti-Spoofing and Selective Availability in GPS 

The military and civilian GPS receivers both employ this technique. Satellite signals are muffled using this method. The military and civilian GPS receivers both employ this technique. Satellite signals are muffled using this method. Different strategies for detecting spoofing of GPS satellites are being investigated and used in real-time.

What is a DDoS Attack?

A DDoS assault is a malicious attempt to interrupt the usual traffic of a targeted server, service, or network by flooding it or its surrounding infrastructure with online traffic.

DDoS assaults are often effective because they use numerous compromised computer systems as attack traffic sources. Computers and other networked resources, such as most of the IoT devices, are examples of exploited machinery.

Anti-Spoofing in DDoS Protection

IP address spoofing is a typical way to get around basic security measures like IP blacklisting, which blocks addresses that have been linked to prior attacks.

Deep Packet Inspection

Deep Packet Inspection (DPI), which involves a detailed examination of all packet headers rather than simply the source IP address, is used by contemporary mitigation systems. Mitigation systems that use DPI can scan the content of different packet headers to reveal additional metrics that can be used to identify and filter harmful traffic.

DPI can be used by a mitigation service to monitor a DDoS traffic stream and detect an inflow of packets with suspiciously similar TTLs and Total Length headers that don't follow a regular pattern. The service can construct a granular profile of an attacker packet and utilize it to screen out bad traffic without disrupting normal visitor flow by tracking such minor irregularities.

The disadvantage of DPI is that it consumes a lot of resources. DPI is likely to cause performance deterioration when used on a large scale, such as during a DDoS assault, and can even render the protected network nearly unusable.

Updated on: 22-Jun-2022

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