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

病毒拒绝服务(VDoS)攻击是一种新的攻击类型，它会影响面向Web的关键任务服务的服务质量(Qos)要求。这些攻击利用毫瓶颈，这是一种持续时间非常短的资源饱和条件，会导致此类服务所使用的n层应用程序中相互依赖的组件之间对资源的累积排队延迟。攻击者可以通过提高作业请求的提交速率(从服务提供商的角度来看是到达速率)或降低作业处理速率(通过提交资源密集型作业)来发起此攻击。由于VDoS攻击的持续时间很短(大约几毫秒)，它们可以保持在传统拒绝服务攻击的典型监测工具的检测阈值以下，因此是微妙和隐蔽的。尽管如此，它们仍有可能造成重大破坏。例如，亚马逊报告称，页面加载时间每增加100ms，销售额就会下降1%；谷歌要求99%的查询在500ms内完成。该项目将调查VDoS攻击的性质和模式，并开发缓解工具来帮助打击这些攻击。研究生和本科生都将参与这项研究。VDoS实验数据集以及与进行VDoS相关实验相关的工具集将公开发布。该项目将按两项任务进行。首先，将进行大规模实验，评估VDoS攻击的各个控制参数之间的相互作用。研究的这一部分将确定VDoS攻击是如何发生的，它们的外部表现是什么，以及如何对它们进行数学建模，以便充分探索攻击粒度和潜在损害之间的权衡。其次，基于通过第一个任务获得的知识，将开发检测方法和工具，以在试验台上重现和/或评估已知的毫秒级VDoS攻击，并发现新的攻击。这将导致用于打击VDoS攻击的缓解工具。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力优势和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

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.