Effect of Malicious Synchronization

Abstract. We study the impact of malicious synchronization on computer systems that serve customers periodically. Systems supporting automatic periodic updates are common in web servers providing regular news update, sports scores or stock quotes. Our study focuses on the possibility of launching an effective low rate attack on the server to degrade performance measured in terms of longer processing time and request drops due to timeouts. The attackers are assumed to behave like normal users and send one request per update cycle. The only parameter utilized in the attack is the timing of the requests sent. By exploiting the periodic nature of the updates, a small number of attackers can herd users' update requests to a cluster and arrive in a short period of time. Herding can be used to discourage new users from joining the system and to modify the user arrival distribution, so that the subsequent burst attack will be effective. While the herding based attacks can be launched with...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2006
• Where: ACNS
• Authors: Mun Choon Chan, Ee-Chien Chang, Liming Lu, Peng Song Ngiam
• Keywords: ACNS 2006, Automatic Periodic Updates, Cryptology, Low Rate Attack, Subsequent Burst Attack