Abstract
With the tremendous growth of Internet resources, we observe a rapid increase in the number of network applications and protocol implementations, which are not always thoroughly evaluated and tasted. A growing number of network attacks attempt to disrupt legitimate communication or deny access to network resources to legitimate users. both poor implementations and intentional abuse of network resources "pollute" a network with malformed packets and can become a threat to sound communication. In this work, we collect and analyze all of the IP and TCP headers of packets seen on a network that either violate existing standards or should not appear in modern internets. Our goal is to determine the reason that these packets appear on the network and evaluate what proportion of such packets could cause actual damage. thus, we examine and devide the unusual packets obtained during our experiments into several categories based on their possible cause, which ranges form errors in network implementation to carefully constructed attack packets, and show the results. The traces analyzed were gathered at two different data sources at Ohio University -- the university's main Internet link connecting it to its ISP and a local network with student dormitory traffic -- and provide a massive amount of statistical data.
