Dusan Stevanovic

Background

About Dusan Stevanovic

The phenomenal growth and success of Internet has changed the way traditional essential services such as banking, transportation, medicine, education and defence are operated. Now they are being actively replaced by cheaper and more efficient Internet-based applications. Today, the world is highly dependent on the Internet, the main infrastructure of the global information society. Therefore, the availability of Internet is very critical for the socio-economic growth of the society. However, the inherent vulnerabilities of the Internet architecture provide opportunities for a lot of attacks on its infrastructure and services. Distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack is one such kind of attack, which poses an immense threat to the availability of the Internet. In general, the traditional DDoS attacks employ illegal packets or network connections that can be easily detected (but not easily stopped) by the signature detections systems such as network firewalls. However, an emerging (and increasingly more prevalent) set of DDoS attacks known as Application Layer or Layer-7 attacks are extremely challenging to detect. The traditional network measurement systems often fail to identify the presence of Layer-7 DDoS attacks. The main reason is that in an application layer attack, the attacker utilizes a legitimate network session. For instance, HTML requests sent to a web server may be cleverly constructed to perform semi-random walks of web site links. Such an attack would resemble the web site traversal of an actual human user. Since the attack signature resembles legitimate traffic, it is difficult to construct an effective metric to detect and defend against the Layer-7 attacks. In my research I focus on developing strategies for detecting an ongoing Layer-7 DDoS attack. My general research interests are in the area of network security, wireless sensor networks and data analytics. Specialties: Network Security Wireless Sensor Networks Software Development Java Developer Visual Basic, HTML, XML, XSL/XSLT, XPath, JSP, Servlets, C/C++, Java, C# J2EE (WebSphere, Tomcat, Apache), UNIX (Solaris), Windows Linux (Red Hat)Rational Rose, Enhydra, P8 BPM Designer, FileNet Workplace Toolkit, Eclipse, Microsoft Office Suite (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Access, Project, Outlook), Visual Studio.NET, Visio, SVN, CVS, Apache Ant, OPNET Modeler