Peer-to-Peer Systems as Attack Platform for Distributed Denial-of-Service
Arno Wagner, Bernhard Plattner · 2002
Distributed Denial-of-Service attacks are an effective means to make a service unavailable, mask other attack activities and generally degrade or disrupt network functionality. The key characteristic is that analysis of and defence against this attack type is dicult because of the high number of attacking hosts and large amount of attack trac that can be generated. The emerging Peer-to-Peer lesharing systems have characteristics that turn them into an attractive infrastructure that can be used as attack platform. Attackers that can compromise a P2P system can expect bene ts such as a large number of participants, easy hiding of attack control trac and good, global distribution of participating hosts. This gives attackers high exibility and at the same time a smal risk of being identi ed. This paper explains these characteristics in detail and concludes that further research into this threat and into possible countermeasures is urgently needed.