EAGER: Subtle and Harmful: Millisecond-scale Viral Denial of Service (VDoS) Attacks

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Viral Denial of Service (VDoS) attacks are a new class of attacks that affect the quality of service (QoS) requirements of mission critical web-facing services. These attacks exploit milli-bottlenecks, which are resource saturation conditions of very short duration that result in accumulated queueing delay for resources among inter-dependent components in the n-tier applications used by such services. The attacker can launch this attack by either increasing the rate of submission of job requests (rate of arrival from the service provider's perspective) or by decreasing the rate of job processing (by submitting jobs that are resource intensive). Owing to the very short duration of VDoS attacks (of the order of several milliseconds), they can remain below the detection threshold of typical monitoring tools for traditional denial of service attacks and are, consequently, subtle and stealthy. Nonetheless, they have the potential to cause significant damage. For example, Amazon reported that every 100ms increase in a page load time is correlated to a decrease in sales by 1%; Google requires 99% of its queries to finish within 500ms. This project will investigate the nature and modalities of VDoS attacks and develop mitigation tools to help combat them. Students at both graduate as well as undergraduate levels will be involved in the research. VDoS experimental data sets as well as tool-sets related to conducting VDoS related experiments will be publicly released.The project will proceed along two tasks. First, large-scale experiments will be conducted to evaluate the interactions among the various control parameters of VDoS attacks. This part of the study will identify how VDoS attacks occur, what their external manifestations are and how they can be mathematically modeled such that the tradeoffs between the granularity of attack and damage potential can be fully explored. Second, based on the knowledge acquired through the first task, detection methods and tools will be developed to reproduce and/or evaluate known millisecond-scale VDoS attacks on a testbed and find new ones. This will then lead to mitigation tools for combating VDoS attacks.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.