Abstract
Telephony Denial of Service (TDoS) attacks target telephony services, such as Voice over IP, not allowing legitimate users to make calls. There are few defenses that attempt to mitigate TDoS attacks, most of them using IP filtering, with limited applicability. In our recent work, we proposed to use selective strategies for mitigating HTTP Application-Layer DDoS Attacks demonstrating their effectiveness in mitigating different types of attacks. This paper demonstrates that selective strategies can also be successfully used to mitigate TDoS attacks, in particular, two attacks: the Coordinated Call Attack and the Prank Call attack. We formalize a novel selective strategy for mitigating these attacks in the computational tool Maude and verify these defenses using the statistical model checker PVeStA. When compared to our experimental results (reported elsewhere), the results obtained by using formal methods were very similar. This demonstrate that formal methods is a powerful tool for specifying defenses for mitigating Distributed Denial of Service attacks allowing to increase our confidence on the proposed defense before actual implementation.
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Notes
- 1.
This can be easily done for many VoIP services.
- 2.
Notice that although our experiments on the network were controlled experiments, they used off-the-shelf tools, such as Apache web-servers, which implement a number of optimizations, and our experiments suffered from interferences that cannot be controlled, such as network latency.
- 3.
In fact, we omit some steps carried out by the server to find Bob in the network. This step can lead to DDoS amplification attacks [13] for which known solutions exists. Such amplification attacks are not, however, the main topic of this paper.
- 4.
Or alternatively two honest users that have been infected to be zombies by some attacker.
- 5.
The value of \(t_M\) can be obtained by the history of a VoIP provider’s usage.
- 6.
We used a Poisson distribution because such distributions are normally used for modeling telephone calls arrival.
- 7.
For the sake of presentation, we simplified here some aspects such as the use of the scheduler appearing in the complete model which can be found in [11].
- 8.
Note that there is a value delay inserted when a message is sent in order to have a more realistic model.
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Acknowledgments
This work was supported by the Hessian excellence initiative LOEWE at the Center for Advanced Security Research Darmstadt (CASED), by RNP, by Capes and CNPq.
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Dantas, Y.G., Lemos, M.O.O., Fonseca, I.E., Nigam, V. (2016). Formal Specification and Verification of a Selective Defense for TDoS Attacks. In: Lucanu, D. (eds) Rewriting Logic and Its Applications. WRLA 2016. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 9942. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-44802-2_5
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