New Low Bandwidth Denial of Service Attacks

An anonymous reader writes "A paper from Rice University appearing at the 2003 ACM Sigcomm Conference presents a new denial of service attack where the attacker only needs to send at a low rate to shutdown TCP flows. The trick exploits the retransmission timeout mechanism in TCP. By sending small bursts of packets at just the right frequency, the attacker can cause all TCP flows sharing a bottleneck link to simultaneously stop indefinitely. And because the attacker only needs to burst periodically, the attacker will not be distinguishable from normal hosts. The presentation, and other presentations from the conference, are available online (live streaming)."

Comments

Get the Lawyers ready.

[HanzoSan]

I'm sure a bunch of companies who get hacked by this will sue Rice University and or whoever wrote this paper.

Maybe we will see Microsoft do this, they like to sue the little guy.