Patent ID: 8312544

Claim:
A method for controlling a denial of service attack on a host comprising: receiving a plurality of packets from a network; identifying an attacking host based on a severity level of the denial of service (DOS) attack from the network; automatically re-configuring, in response to the identifying, a classifier to forward each of the plurality of packets associated with the attacking host to a temporary data structure associated with the severity level of the DOS attack, wherein the classifier is located on a physical network interface card operatively connected to the host, wherein the temporary data structure is one of a plurality of temporary data structures on the host, wherein each of the plurality of temporary data structures is associated with one of a plurality of severity levels, and wherein the attacking host is identified using an identifying attack characteristic; identifying, using the classifier, each of the plurality of packets associated with the identifying attack characteristic by a classifier; forwarding each of the identified plurality of packets associated with the identifying attack characteristic to the temporary data structure; requesting, by the host, a number of packets from the temporary data structure matching the severity level to be placed in a virtual serialization queue, wherein the virtual serialization queue is associated with the temporary data structure, and wherein the temporary data structure comprises at least one receive ring; forwarding the requested number of packets to the virtual serialization queue; receiving, in response to forwarding the requested number of packets to the virtual serialization queue, at least one packet by the virtual serialization queue, wherein the at least one packet is placed in one of a plurality of sub-virtualization queues in the virtual serialization queue based on the temporary data structure from which the at least one packet was forwarded; and scheduling when to process the at least one packet using a packet scheduler in the virtual serialization queue, wherein the packet scheduler schedules the at least one packet based on a priority level associated with the one of the plurality of sub-virtualization queues in which the at least one packet is stored, wherein the priority level is associated with the severity level.