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The Frog-Boiling Attack: Limitations of Anomaly Detection for Secure Network Coordinate Systems

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Security and Privacy in Communication Networks (SecureComm 2009)

Abstract

A network coordinate system assigns Euclidean “virtual” coordinates to every node in a network to allow easy estimation of network latency between pairs of nodes that have never contacted each other. These systems have been implemented in a variety of applications, most notably the popular Azureus/Vuze BitTorrent client. Zage and Nita-Rotaru (CCS 2007) and independently, Kaafar et al. (SIGCOMM 2007), demonstrated that several widely-cited network coordinate systems are prone to simple attacks, and proposed mechanisms to defeat these attacks using outlier detection to filter out adversarial inputs. We propose a new attack, Frog-Boiling, that defeats anomaly-detection based defenses in the context of network coordinate systems, and demonstrate empirically that Frog-Boiling is more disruptive than the previously known attacks. Our results suggest that a new approach is needed to solve this problem: outlier detection alone cannot be used to secure network coordinate systems.

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© 2009 ICST Institute for Computer Science, Social Informatics and Telecommunications Engineering

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Chan-Tin, E., Feldman, D., Hopper, N., Kim, Y. (2009). The Frog-Boiling Attack: Limitations of Anomaly Detection for Secure Network Coordinate Systems. In: Chen, Y., Dimitriou, T.D., Zhou, J. (eds) Security and Privacy in Communication Networks. SecureComm 2009. Lecture Notes of the Institute for Computer Sciences, Social Informatics and Telecommunications Engineering, vol 19. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-05284-2_26

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-05284-2_26

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-642-05283-5

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-642-05284-2

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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