Mitigation of DHCP starvation attack

DHCP starvation attack is an attack that targets DHCP servers whereby forged DHCP requests are crafted by an attacker with the intent of exhausting all available IF addresses that can be allocated by the DHCP server. Under this attack, legitimate network users can be denied service. In this paper, we describe the seriousness of the attack and survey and evaluate existing solutions designed to mitigate such an attack. In addition, we propose a novel mitigation solution. Our solution overcomes the limitations of existing solutions in terms of performance, effectiveness, and flexibility. Our solution is based on dynamic fair allocation of IF addresses and is suitable for unshared and shared (wireless) access networks. We study and analyze the proposed mitigation technique through numerical examples and simulations. Furthermore, simulation results show that our proposed solution is far superior in mitigating DHCP starvation attack when compared to other existing techniques such as fixed allocation and DHCP request rate detection. (c) 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.