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 a small amount of resource, they can be easily prevented by adding a small random component to the length of the update interval.
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© 2006 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
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Chan, M.C., Chang, EC., Lu, L., Ngiam, P.S. (2006). Effect of Malicious Synchronization. In: Zhou, J., Yung, M., Bao, F. (eds) Applied Cryptography and Network Security. ACNS 2006. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 3989. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/11767480_8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/11767480_8
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