Detecting stealth DHCP starvation attack using machine learning approach

Abstract

Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP) is used to automatically configure clients with IP address and other network configuration parameters. Due to absence of any in-built authentication, the protocol is vulnerable to a class of Denial-of-Service (DoS) attacks, popularly known as DHCP starvation attacks. However, known DHCP starvation attacks are either ineffective in wireless networks or not stealthy in some of the network topologies. In this paper, we first propose a stealth DHCP starvation attack which is effective in both wired and wireless networks and can not be detected by known detection mechanisms. We test the effectiveness of proposed attack in both IPv4 and IPv6 networks and show that it can successfully prevent other clients from obtaining IP address, thereby, causing DoS scenario. In order to detect the proposed attack, we also propose a Machine Learning (ML) based anomaly detection framework. In particular, we use some popular one-class classifiers for the detection purpose. We capture IPv4 and IPv6 traffic from a real network with thousands of devices and evaluate the detection capability of different machine learning algorithms. Our experiments show that the machine learning algorithms can detect the attack with high accuracy in both IPv4 and IPv6 networks. © 2017, Springer-Verlag France SAS.