How well can congestion pricing neutralize denial of service attacks?

Abstract

Denial of service protection mechanisms usually require classifying malicious traffic, which can be difficult. Another approach is to price scarce resources. However, while congestion pricing has been suggested as a way to combat DoS attacks, it has not been shown quantitatively how much damage a malicious player could cause to the utility of benign participants. In this paper, we quantify the protection that congestion pricing affords against DoS attacks, even for powerful attackers that can control their packets' routes. Specifically, we model the limits on the resources available to the attackers in three different ways and, in each case, quantify the maximum amount of damage they can cause as a function of their resource bounds. In addition, we show that congestion pricing is provably superior to fair queueing in attack resilience.

On The Robustness of Price-Anticipating Kelly Mechanism

“…Unom , V mal Vnom and W mal Wnom demonstrate the changes of metrics between the two NEs excluding and including the misbehaving user. Compared with previous studies [4] and [22], our work considers two important extra metrics (V and W), derives both the lower and the (approximate) upper bounds of these ratios instead of the lower bounds only. The theoretical results are obtained for any number of benign users other than the regime of the infinite number of benign users.…”

“…The theoretical results are obtained for any number of benign users other than the regime of the infinite number of benign users. The approaches of analyzing the bounds are also different from those in [4] and [22], and they are far beyond simple calculations because the NEs at different games involve different sets of players. The lower bounds manifest how the utility and the net utility of benign users, and the revenue of network operator are influenced by the maliciousness of the misbehaving user in the worst case.…”

“…For instance, an attacker can hijack zombie computers so as to generate a high volume of misbehaving traffic to perform denial-of-service (DoS) attacks. Authors in [22] presented PAKM to allocate bandwidth among the benign users and the attacker. For visibility competition in OSNs, the fraction of viewers' attention is determined by PAKM [15] where the misbehaving advertiser can decrease the visibility of the benign advertisers by posting excessive messages to social media, thus flushing down the relatively old messages of benign ones.…”

“…While the satisfaction of the misbehaving user is not determined by the resourced allocated by him, but the losses that the benign users suffer from the misbehaviors. Similar to [22], the hostility of the misbehaving user is captured by his willingness to pay or willingness factor. The willingness factor refers to a scalar that the misbehaving user wishes to use a unit cost or payment to trade for the loss of aggregate utility of the benign users.…”

“…When the misbehaving user performs actions, we are faced with the following fundamental question: To what extent the misbehaving user can damage or influence the performance of the benign users and the network operator at a Nash Equilibrium? In [22], authors present two metrics, U and L.…”