Alex C. Snoeren, Craig Partridge, Luis A. Sanchez, Christine E. Jones, Fabrice Tchakountio, Stephen T. Kent, and W. Timothy Strayer.
Proc. of the ACM SIGCOMM 2001 Conference on Applications, Technologies, Architectures, and Protocols for Computer Communication, August 2001.
An earlier version appeared as BBN Technologies Technical Memo, BBN-TM-1284.

The design of the IP protocol makes it difficult to reliably identify the originator of an IP packet. Even in the absence of any deliberate attempt to disguise a packet's origin, wide-spread packet forwarding techniques such as NAT and encapsulation may obscure the packet's true source from the destination. Techniques have been developed to determine the source of large packet flows, but, to date, no system has been presented to track individual packets in an efficient, scalable fashion.

We present a hash-based technique for IP traceback that generates audit trails for traffic within the network, and can trace the origin of a single IP packet delivered by the network in the recent past. We demonstrate that the system is effective, space efficient (requiring approximately 0.5% of the link capacity per unit time in storage), and implementable in current or next-generation routing hardware. We present both analytic and simulation results showing the system's effectiveness.

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(A substantially revised version appeared in IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking (ToN))

(This paper received the ACM SIGCOMM 2001 Student Paper Award.)