Vulnerability of Network Mechanisms to Sophisticated DDoS Attacks

Abstract:

            The basic form of a DDoS attack is the simple high bandwidth DDoS attack. That is, simple brute force flooding, where the attacker sends as much traffic as he can to consume the network resources, namely the bandwidth of the server’s incoming link, without using any knowledge of the system design. In this work, we focus on sophisticated low-bandwidth attacks. We define sophisticated low-bandwidth DDoS attacks as attacks that increase their effectiveness by aiming at hurting a weak point in the victim’s system design, i.e., the attacker sends traffic consisting of complicated requests to the system.  Using the Vulnerability measure, we made interesting observations regarding the vulnerability of Hash systems: The Closed Hash system is much more vulnerable to DDoS attacks than the Open Hash system.  After an attack has ended, regular users still suffer from performance degradation.