Mitigating DoS Attacks Using Performance Model-Driven Adaptive Algorithms

  • Authors:

  • Cornel Barna;Mark Shtern;Michael Smit;Vassilios Tzerpos;Marin Litoiu

  • Affiliations:

  • York University;York University;Dalhousie University;York University;York University

  • Venue:
  • ACM Transactions on Autonomous and Adaptive Systems (TAAS)
  • Year:
  • 2014

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Abstract

Denial of Service (DoS) attacks overwhelm online services, preventing legitimate users from accessing a service, often with impact on revenue or consumer trust. Approaches exist to filter network-level attacks, but application-level attacks are harder to detect at the firewall. Filtering at this level can be computationally expensive and difficult to scale, while still producing false positives that block legitimate users. This article presents a model-based adaptive architecture and algorithm for detecting DoS attacks at the web application level and mitigating them. Using a performance model to predict the impact of arriving requests, a decision engine adaptively generates rules for filtering traffic and sending suspicious traffic for further review, where the end user is given the opportunity to demonstrate they are a legitimate user. If no legitimate user responds to the challenge, the request is dropped. Experiments performed on a scalable implementation demonstrate effective mitigation of attacks launched using a real-world DoS attack tool.