Denial-of-service (DoS) attacks significantly degrade service quality experienced by legitimate users by introducing long delays, excessive losses, and service interruptions. The main goal of DoS defenses is to neutralize this effect, and to quickly and fully restore quality of various services to levels acceptable by the users. To objectively evaluate a variety of proposed defenses, we must be able to precisely measure damage created by an attack, i.e., the denial of service itself, in controlled testbed experiments. Current evaluation methodologies measure DoS damage superficially and partially by measuring a single traffic parameter, such as duration, loss or throughput, and showing divergence of this parameter during the attack from its baseline case. These measures do not consider quality-of-service requirements of different applications and how they map into specific thresholds for various traffic parameters. They thus fail to measure the overall service quality experienced by t...
Jelena Mirkovic, Peter L. Reiher, Sonia Fahmy, Ros