Defence against denial of service in self-aware networks
George Loukas · 2006
Denial of Service (DoS) has become a prevalent threat in today’s networks. Motivated by an impressive variety of reasons and directed against an equally impressive variety of targets, DoS attacks are not as difficult to launch as one would expect. Protection against them is, however, disproportionately difficult. Despite the extensive research in recent years, DoS attacks continue to harm. In our thesis, we start with a historic time-line of DoS incidents to illustrate the variety of types, targets and motives and how DoS attacks evolved during the last 10 years. We then present an overview of the existing proposals on both detection of such attacks and defence against them. Recognising the fact that the networks of the near future will feature self-awareness and online interac-tion with the users, we investigate the application of existing techniques together with novel techniques that we have designed, on the DoS resilience of Self-Aware Networks (SAN). We introduce a generic framework of DoS protection based on the dropping of probable illegitimate traffic, and we present a mathematical model with which we can measure the impact that both attack and defence have on the performance of a network.