Journal
IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON PARALLEL AND DISTRIBUTED SYSTEMS
Volume 20, Issue 2, Pages 191-206Publisher
IEEE COMPUTER SOC
DOI: 10.1109/TPDS.2008.70
Keywords
Internet dependability; intrusion detection and tolerance; distributed systems; reliable networks; malicious routers
Ask authors/readers for more resources
In this paper, we consider the problem of detecting whether a compromised router is maliciously manipulating its stream of packets. In particular, we are concerned with a simple yet effective attack in which a router selectively drops packets destined for some victim. Unfortunately, it is quite challenging to attribute a missing packet to a malicious action because normal network congestion can produce the same effect. Modern networks routinely drop packets when the load temporarily exceeds their buffering capacities. Previous detection protocols have tried to address this problem with a user-defined threshold: too many dropped packets imply malicious intent. However, this heuristic is fundamentally unsound; setting this threshold is, at best, an art and will certainly create unnecessary false positives or mask highly focused attacks. We have designed, developed, and implemented a compromised router detection protocol that dynamically infers, based on measured traffic rates and buffer sizes, the number of congestive packet losses that will occur. Once the ambiguity from congestion is removed, subsequent packet losses can be attributed to malicious actions. We have tested our protocol in Emulab and have studied its effectiveness in differentiating attacks from legitimate network behavior.
Authors
I am an author on this paper
Click your name to claim this paper and add it to your profile.
Reviews
Recommended
No Data Available