On the Design of a Low-Rate DoS Attack Against Iterative Servers

Recent research exposes the vulnerability of current networked applications to a family of low-rate DoS attacks based on timing mechanisms. A kind of those attacks is targeted against iterative servers and employs an ON/OFF scheme to send attack packets during the chosen critical periods. The overall behaviour of the attack is well known and its effectiveness has been demonstrated in previous works. Nevertheless, it is possible to achieve a trade off between the performance of the attack and its detectability. This can be done by tuning some parameters of the attack waveform according to the needs of the attacker and the deployed detection mechanisms. In this paper, a mathematical model for the relationship among those parameters and their impact in the performance of the attack is evaluated. The main goal of the model is to provide a better understanding of the dynamics of the attack, which is explored through simulation. The results obtained point out the model as accurate, thus providing a framework feasible to be used to tune the attack.