DDoS Protections for SMTP Servers
Venue
International Journal of Computer Science and Security (IJCSS), vol. 4 (2011), pp. 497-610
Publication Year
2011
Authors
Michael Still, Eric McCreath
BibTeX
Abstract
Many businesses rely on email of some form for their day to day operation. This is
especially true for product support organizations, who are largely unable to
perform their role in the company if their in boxes are flooded with malicious
email, or if important email is delayed because of the processing of attack
traffic. Simple Message Transfer Protocol (SMTP) is the Internet protocol for the
transmission of these emails. Denial of Service (DoS) attacks are deliberate
attempts by an attacker to disrupt the normal operation of a service with the goal
of stopping legitimate requests for the service from being processed. This
disruption normally takes the form of large delays in responding to requests,
dropped requests, and other service interruptions. In this paper we explore the
current state of research into Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack
detection, protection and mitigation for SMTP servers connected to the Internet. We
find that whilst there has been significant research into DDoS protection and
detection generally, much of it is not relevant to SMTP servers. During our survey
we found only two papers directly addressing defending SMTP servers against such
attacks.
