Pollution attacks and defenses for Internet caching systems
Computer Networks: The International Journal of Computer and Telecommunications Networking
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Proxy caching servers are widely deployed in today's Internet. While cooperation among proxy caches can significantly improvea network驴s resilience to denial-of-service (DoS) attacks, lack of cooperation can transform such servers into viable DoStargets. In this paper, we investigate a class of pollution attacks that aim to degrade a proxy's caching capabilities, eitherby ruining the cache file locality, or by inducing false file locality. Using simulations, we propose and evaluate the effectsof pollution attacks both in web and peer-to-peer (p2p) scenarios, and reveal dramatic variability in resilience to pollutionamong several cache replacement policies. We develop efficient methods to detect both false-locality and locality-disruptionattacks, as well as a combination of the two. To achieve high scalability for a large number of clients/requests without sacrificingthe detection accuracy, we leverage streaming computation techniques, i.e., bloom filters. Evaluation results from large-scalesimulations show that these mechanisms are effective and efficient in detecting and mitigating such attacks. Furthermore,a Squid-based implementation demonstrates that our protection mechanism forces the attacker to launch extremely large distributedattacks in order to succeed.