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

Tough paper to read

[Brahmastra]

This is a tough paper to read. It's going to be a long time before an "Insightful" post.

Low bandwith DOSing?

[XSforMe]

are available online (live streaming).
This guy is an amateur, wait until he feels the slashdot effect on his server. His next presentation will be entitled, how to knock down any server by just posting an article.

Arrest them!

[canajin56]

Good grief, they are giving instructions for how to DoS people! Arrest them using the DMCA! QUICK, BEFORE THE CAT IS OUT OF THE BAG!

Re:yay (faker!)

[gosand]

Yay, finally there's use for my trustworthy 2400bod modem :D

Anyone who is actually old enough to have used one of these would certainly know how to spell it correctly.

I call faker! You are just trying to pretend you are some 31337 old geek when you probably have never used anything slower than a DSL line.

Now get out of here before I whip ya with this here cable with BNC connectors.

Re:Obligatory simpsons quote...

[admiralh]

When a blimp crashed on a roof a few years ago, I always envisioned the people on the roof looking up and shouting, "Look Out! Walk for your lives!"

Re:yay

[KUHurdler]

You had "1"s? all I had were zeros