The shrew Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks are periodic, bursty, and stealthy in nature. They are also known as Reduction of Quality (RoQ) attacks. Such attacks could be even more detrimental than the widely known flooding DDoS attacks because they damage the victim servers for a long time without being noticed, thereby denying new visitors to the victim servers, which are mostly e-commerce sites. Thus, in order to minimize the huge monetary losses, there is a pressing need to effectively detect such attacks in real-time.

stealthy Tracing Attackers Research Light TracE (STARLITE) is a customization and significant extension to BBN?s Source Path Isolation Engine (SPIE.) The goal of STARLITE was to construct a prototype to integrate single packet traceback with stepping stone detection. The resulting prototype traces a packet to an ingress router, and then discovers if the flow of that packet is related to a flow in another connection. A successful correlation can then be continued until an ultimate source is located.