ARP cache poisoning mitigation and forensics investigation

Abstract

Address Resolution Protocol (ARP) cache spoofing or poisoning is an OSI layer 2 attack that exploits the statelessness vulnerability of the protocol to make network hosts susceptible to issues such as Man in the Middle attack, host impersonation, Denial of Service (DoS) and session hijacking. In this paper, a quantitative research approach is used to propose forensic tools for capturing evidences and mitigating ARP cache poisoning. The baseline approach is adopted to validate the proposed tools. The evidences captured before attack are compared against evidences captured when the network is under attack in order to ascertain the validity of the proposed tools in capturing ARP cache spoofing evidences. To mitigate the ARP poisoning attack, the security features DHCP Snooping and Dynamic ARP Inspection (DAI) are enabled and configured on a Cisco switch. The experimentation results showed the effectiveness of the proposed mitigation technique