Development of F-NTAS: A Network Traffic Analysis System for Detecting Denial of Service Attack

Abstract

Frequent and large-scale network attacks on computer networks are obviously leading to an increased need for developing techniques and tools for analysing traffics of a network. Hence, with the availability of efficient analysis tools, it could be possible to detect a network related attacks, anomalies and appropriately take action to contain the attacks before they have time to propagate across the network. Therefore, this research developed a network monitoring system, named F-NTAS that was based on Random Early Detection algorithm. The system can automatically sniff a network, capture live packets, dumps packets traffic to file, visualize network traffic and monitor packet traffic characteristics. Practically, F-NTAS was used in real-time to capture and analyse internet traffic for probable Denial of Service (DoS) attack. Interestingly, results obtained from the system demonstration, revealed that network traffic is a randomised sinusoid sequence and the characteristics of the traffic could distinguish normal traffic from a malicious one to detect imminent DoS attack.