A Dos-Limiting Network Architecture

Abstract

We present the design and evaluation of a network architecture that limits the impact of Denial of Service (DoS) floods from the outset.  Our work builds on earlier work on capabilities in which senders obtain short-term authorizations from receivers that they use to stamp their packets. Unlike previous work, however, our design addresses the full range of possible attacks against communication between pairs of hosts, including spoofed packet floods, network and host bottlenecks, and router state exhaustion. We use simulation to show that attack traffic can only degrade legitimate traffic to a limited extent, significantly outperforming previously proposed DoS solutions. We use a modified Linux kernel implementation to argue that our design can run on gigabit links using only inexpensive off-the-shelf hardware. Our design is also easy to transition into practice, providing incremental benefit for incremental deployment.

Papers

Xiaowei Yang, David Wetherall, and Tom Anderson, "A DoS-limiting Network Architecture," SIGCOMM 2005 PDF.

Xiaowei Yang, David Wetherall, and Tom Anderson, "TVA: A DoS-limiting Network Architecture," submitted to ToN, PDF.

Software

The source code used to produce our simulation results can be found here.
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