BoNeSi – The DDoS Botnet Simulator

BoNeSi, the DDoS Botnet Simulator is a Tool to simulate Botnet Traffic in a tested environment on the wire. It is designed to study the effect of DDoS attacks.

What traffic can be generated?

BoNeSi generates ICMP, UDP and TCP (HTTP) flooding attacks from a defined botnet size (different IP addresses). BoNeSi is highly configurable and rates, data volume, source IP addresses, URLs and other parameters can be configured.

What makes it different from other tools?

There are plenty of other tools out there to spoof IP addresses with UDP and ICMP, but for TCP spoofing, there is no solution. It is the first tool to simulate HTTP-GET floods from large-scale bot networks. Italso tries to avoid to generate packets with easy identifiable patterns (which can be filtered out easily).

Where can I run BoNeSi?

We highly recommend to run BoNeSi in a closed tested environment. However, UDP and ICMP attacks could be run in the internet as well, but you should be careful. HTTP-Flooding attacks can not be simulated in the internet, because answers from the web-server must be routed back to the host running BoNeSi.

How does TCP Spoofing work?

BoNeSi sniffs for TCP packets on the network interface and responds to all packets in order to establish TCP connections. For this feature, it is necessary, that all traffic from the target webserver is routed back to the host running BoNeSi

How good is the performance of BoNeSi?

We focused very much on performance in order to simulate big botnets. On an AMD Opteron with 2Ghz we were able to generate up to 150,000 packets per second. On a more recent AMD Phenom II X6 1100T with 3.3Ghz you can generate 300,000 pps (running on 2 cores).

Are BoNeSi attacks successful?

Yes, they are very successful. UDP/ ICMP attacks can easily fill the bandwidth and HTTP-Flooding attacks knock out web-servers fast. We also tested BoNeSi against state-of-the-art commercial DDoS mitigation systems and where able to either crash them or hiding the attack from being detected.

Also Read – FIR : Fast Incident Response

Detailed Information

BoNeSi is a network traffic generator for different protocol types. The attributes of the created packets and connections can be controlled by several parameters like send rate or payload size or they are determined by chance.

It spoofs the source ip addresses even when generating tcp traffic. Therefor it includes a simple tcp-stack to handle tcp connections in promiscuous mode. For correct work, one has to ensure that the response packets are routed to the host at which BoNeSi is running.

Therefore BoNeSi cannot used in arbitrary network infrastructures. The most advanced kind of traffic that can be generated are http requests.

TCP/HTTP In order to make the http requests more realistic, several things are determined by chance:

source port
ttl: 3..255
tcp options: out of seven different real life options with different lengths and probabilities
user agent for http header: out of a by file given list (an example file is included, see below)

Installation

:~$ ./configure
:~$ make
:~$ make install

Usage

:~$ bonesi [OPTION…]
Options:
-i, –ips=FILENAME filename with ip list
-p, –protocol=PROTO udp (default), icmp or tcp
-r, –send_rate=NUM packets per second, 0 = infinite (default)
-s, –payload_size=SIZE size of the paylod, (default: 32)
-o, –stats_file=FILENAME filename for the statistics, (default: ‘stats’)
-c, –max_packets=NUM maximum number of packets (requests at tcp/http), 0 = infinite (default)
–integer IPs are integers in host byte order instead of in dotted notation
-t, –max_bots=NUM determine max_bots in the 24bit prefix randomly (1-256)
-u, –url=URL the url (default: ‘/’) (only for tcp/http)
-l, –url_list=FILENAME filename with url list (only for tcp/http)
-b, –useragent_list=FILENAME filename with useragent list (only for tcp/http)
-d, –device=DEVICE network listening device (only for tcp/http, e.g. eth1)
-m, –mtu=NUM set MTU, (default 1500). Currently only when using TCP.
-f, –frag=NUM set fragmentation mode (0=IP, 1=TCP, default: 0). Currently only when using TCP.
-v, –verbose print additional debug messages
-h, –help print help message and exit