Performance analysis of TCP/AQM under denial-of-service attacks
Xiapu Luo, Rocky K. C. Chang, Edmond W. W. Chan · 2005
The interaction between TCP and various Active Queue Management (AQM) algorithms has been extensively ana-lyzed for the last few years. However, the analysis usually assumed that routers and TCP flows are not under any net-work attacks. In this paper, we investigate how the perfor-mance of TCP flows is affected by denial-of-service (DoS) attacks under the Drop Tail and various AQM schemes. In particular, we consider two types of DoS attacks—the tra-ditional flooding-based DoS (FDDoS) attacks and the re-cently proposed Pulsing DoS (PDoS) attacks. Both analyt-ical and simulation results support that the PDoS attacks are more effective than the FDDoS attacks under the same average attack rate. Moreover, the Drop Tail surprisingly outperforms the RED-like AQMs when the router is un-der a PDoS attack, whereas the RED-like AQMs perform better under a severe FDDoS attack. On the other hand, the Adaptive Virtual Queue algorithm can retain a higher TCP throughput during PDoS attacks as compared with the RED-like AQMs. 1