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

Dupe story. Mod me sideways...

[fuqqer]

This is a duplicate storyfrom a looonnnng time ago. May 31 as a matter of fact. This means something considering the amount brain cells I kill with liquor everyday.

Direct link to paper

[Hygelac]

Gzipped Postscript file

Re:Where can I read about this?

[cK-Gunslinger]

Uh, click on the word "paper" in the story, then click on "This paper is available in Adobe PDF format."

Or Cick Here

Re:Tough paper to read

[tomhudson]

Actually, this isn't new. The exact reverse concept was mentioned here as a way to fight spam.

Re:yay (faker!)

[hey]

"baud" is named after J.M.E. Baudot who was French. more info