Evaluation of a low-rate DoS attack against iterative servers

This paper presents a low-rate DoS attack that could be launched against iterative servers. Such an attack takes advantage of the vulnerability consisting in the possibility of forecasting the instant at which an iterative server will generate a response to a client request. This knowledge could allow a potential intruder to overflow application buffers with relatively low-rate traffic to the server, thus avoiding the usual DoS IDS detection techniques. Besides the fundamentals of the attack, the authors also introduce a mathematical model for evaluating the efficiency of this kind of attack. The evaluation is contrasted with both simulated and real implementations. Some variants of the attack are also studied. The overall results derived from this work show how the proposed low-rate DoS attack could cause an important negative impact on the performance of iterative servers. (c) 2006 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.