A microscopic competition model and its dynamics analysis on network attacks

Modeling network traffic has been a critical task in the development of Internet. Attacks and defense are prevalent in the current Internet. Traditional network models such as Poisson‐related models do not consider the competition behaviors between the attack and defense parties. In this paper, we present a microscopic competition model to analyze the dynamics among the nodes, benign or malicious, connected to a router, which compete for the bandwidth. The dynamics analysis demonstrates that the model can well describe the competition behavior among normal users and attackers. Based on this model, an anomaly attack detection method is presented. The method is based on the adaptive resonance theory, which is used to learn the model by normal traffic data. The evaluation shows that it can effectively detect the network attacks. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.