Defending Against Denial-of-Service Attacks with Puzzle Auctions

  • Authors:
  • XiaoFeng Wang;Michael K. Reiter

  • Affiliations:
  • -;-

  • Venue:
  • SP '03 Proceedings of the 2003 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy
  • Year:
  • 2003

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Abstract

Although client puzzles represent a promising approach to defend against certain classes of denial-of-service attacks, several questions stand in the way oftheir deployment in practice: e.g., how to set the puzzledifficulty in the presence of an adversary with unknowncomputing power, and how to integrate the approachwith existing mechanisms. In this paper, we attempt toaddress these questions with a new puzzle mechanismcalled the puzzle auction. Our mechanism enables eachclient to "bid" for resources by tuning the difficulty ofthe puzzles it solves, and to adapt its bidding strategyin response to apparent attacks. We analyze the effectiveness of our auction mechanism and further demonstrate it using an implementation within the TCP protocol stack of the Linux kernel. Our implementationhas several appealing properties. It effectively defendsagainst SYN ooding attacks, is fully compatible withTCP, and even provides a degree of interoperabilitywith clients with unmodified kernels: Even without apuzzle-solving kernel, a client still can connect to a puzzle auction server under attack (albeit less effectivelythan those with puzzle-solving kernels, and at the costof additional server expense).