Flow measurement evolved into the primary method for measuring the composition of Internet traffic. Cisco’s NetFlow is a widely
deployed flow measurement solution that uses a configurable static sampling rate to control processor and memory usage on
the router and the amount of reporting flow records generated. But during flooding attacks the memory and network bandwidth
consumed by flow records can increase beyond what is available. In this paper, we propose an entropy based flow aggregation
algorithm, which not only alleviates the problem in memory and export bandwidth, but also maximizes the accuracy of legitimate
flows. Relying on information-theoretic techniques, the algorithm efficiently identifies the clusters of attack flows in real
time and aggregates those large number of short attack flows to a few metaflows. Finally, we evaluate our system using real
trace files from the Internet.