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In this paper we investigate the vulnerability of the Internet Group Management Protocol (IGMP) to be leveraged for denial-of-service (DoS) attacks. IGMP is a connectionless protocol and therefore susceptible to attackers spoofing a third-party victim's source address in an effort to coax responders to send their replies to the victim. We find 305K IGMP responders that will indeed answer queries from arbitrary Internet hosts. Further, the responses are often larger than the requests, hence amplifying the attacker's own expenditure of bandwidth. We conclude that attackers can coordinate IGMP responders to mount sizeable DoS attacks.
Fiber-To-The-Home (FTTH) networks are on the brink of bringing significantly higher capacity to residential users compared to today's commercial residential options. There are several burgeoning FTTH networks that provide capacities of up to 1 Gbps. We have been monitoring one such operational network-the Case Connection Zone-for 23 months. In this paper we seek to understand the extent to which the users in this network are in fact making use of the provided bi-directional 1 Gbps capacity. We find that even when given virtually unlimited capacity the majority of the time users do not retrieve information from the Internet in excess of commercially available data rates and transmit at only modestly higher rates than commodity networks support. Further, we find that end host issues-most prominently buffering at both end points-are often the cause of the lower-than-expected performance.
Modern warfare is characterized by a complex environment of operations spanning multiple domains leveraged to achieve advantage against the adversary in both strategic competition and armed conflict. However, understanding complexity in warfare, often referred to as the art of war, is rarely framed in a structured way. This report seeks to provide an initial examination of how complex adaptive systems thinking can frame opportunities and challenges of complexity in warfare. This report is the first in a two-volume report. The second volume, Leveraging Complexity in Great-Power Competition and Warfare: Volume II, Technical Details for a Complex Adaptive Systems Lens, provides additional information to support this volume. This report examines how complex adaptive systems thinking can be applied to great-power competition and warfare to aid in understanding how complexity might be exploited to U.S. advantage. This report should be of interest to planners, geographic commands, and the military science and technology community.
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