Stealthy Denial of Service (DoS) Attack Vulnerability Analysis and Defense

Goal

To study the vulnerabilities in distributed systems and networks, especially for the stealthy DoS attacks.

Stealthy Spreader Detection: Detecting stealthy spreaders, the presence of a sufficiently large number of hosts that connect to more than a certain number of unique destinations within a given time window, over high-speed networks.
Error Message based DoS Attack on wireless networks: Triggering or directly sending error messages may disrupt many protocols and we found this also happen in some important authentication protocols. With two case studies of real experiments, we demonstrate the practicality and power of this attack. The two vulnerable protocols are: 1) TLS based EAP protocols including PEAP, EAP-TLS and EAP-FAST; 2) IEEE 802.16 Return Routability protocol.

Yan Gao, Leiwen Deng, Aleksandar Kuzmanovic, and Yan Chen, Internet Cache Pollution Attacks and Countermeasures, in Proc. of the 14th IEEE International Conference on Network Protocols (ICNP), Nov. 2006
Yan Gao, Yao Zhao, Robert Schweller, Shobha Venkataraman, Yan Chen, Dawn Song, and Ming-Yang Kao, Detecting Stealthy Spreaders Using Online Outdegree Histograms, in the Proc. of the 15th IEEE International Workshop on Quality of Service (IWQoS), 2007
Leiwen Deng, Yan Gao, Yan Chen, and Alexsander Kuzmanovic, Pollution Attacks and Defenses for Internet Caching Systems, in Journal of Computer Networks, Volume 52, Issue 5, 2008

Attack codes on PEAP

Available upon request because of the sensitivity of the code.