Abstract
Recent distributed denial of service attacks have demonstrated the difficulty with tracing network attackers on the Internet and simultaneously led to calls for development of systems to track network traffic to its source. Tracking network traffic is difficult because of two basic techniques used
to obfuscate the source of the traffic: spoofing and redirection.
In this paper, we examine the desirable properties of network traffic tracking systems (NTTS) from both the technical and social perspectives. An analysis of the feasibility of a system with these properties in a number of
increasingly open network models leads us to a number of conclusions. First, NTTS may be very successful in relatively closed environments where there is strong control of
the infrastructure, and there is no expectation of privacy. Second, in an open, global Internet, it is not be feasible to deploy a perfect NTTS. Third, if a perfect NTTS for the Internet is not possible, how do we evaluate the consequences of deployment of an evadeable NTTS.
