Resource Inflation Threats to Denial of Service Countermeasures

Shankesi, Ravinder; Fatemieh, Omid; Gunter, Carl A.

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https://hdl.handle.net/2142/17372 Copy

Description

Title

Resource Inflation Threats to Denial of Service Countermeasures

Author(s)

• Shankesi, Ravinder
• Fatemieh, Omid
• Gunter, Carl A.

Issue Date

2010-10-26

Keyword(s)

Denial of Service (DoS) Defense, Hash Puzzles, Proof of Work, GPU, Resource Fairness, Computational Puzzles

Abstract

Currency-based mechanisms have been proposed as a way to use resource fairness among contenders for a service to thwart Denial of Service (DoS) attacks. Under resource fairness, a server allocates its service to the clients in proportion to their payment of a resource, making the resource serve as a kind of currency. We consider the vulnerability of currency-based DoS defense mechanisms to various resource inflation attacks in which an attacker can substantially inflate its possession of the resource at low cost and in a way that may be either difficult or undesirable for a valid client to do. We provide a simple theoretical analysis of resource inflation attacks and investigate its application to a number of payment schemes to rank their likely vulnerability. We find that the threat of Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) for inflation attacks is especially severe: we are able to demonstrate inflation of up to 630x with common inexpensive GPUs. We also review threats from other capabilities, including multi-core processors, cloud computing, and bandwidth inflation schemes.

Type of Resource

text

Language

en

Permalink

http://hdl.handle.net/2142/17372

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