Tail Attacks on Web Applications
Huasong Shan, Qingyang Wang, Calton Pu · 2017
As the extension of Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attacks to application layer in recent years, researchers pay much interest in these new variants due to a low-volume and intermittent pattern with a higher level of stealthiness, invaliding the state-of-the-art DDoS detection/defense mechanisms. We describe a new type of low-volume application layer DDoS attack--Tail Attacks on Web Applications. Such attack exploits a newly identified system vulnerability of n-tier web applications (millibottlenecks with sub-second duration and resource contention with strong dependencies among distributed nodes) with the goal of causing the long-tail latency problem of the target web application (e.g., 95th percentile response time > 1 second) and damaging the long-term business of the service provider, while all the system resources are far from saturation, making it difficult to trace the cause of performance degradation.