The Accountability Problem of Flooding Attacks in Service-Oriented Architectures

The threat of Denial of Service attacks poses a serious problem to the security of network-based services in general. For flooding attacks against service-oriented applications, this threat is dramatically amplified with potentially much higher impact and very little effort on the attacker´s side. Additionally, due to the high distribution of a SOA application´s components, fending such attacks becomes a far more complex task. In this paper, we present the problem of accountability, referring to the issue of resolving the attacker in a highly distributed service-oriented application. Using a general flooding attack model, we illustrate the problem´s parameters, and we finally discuss some general solution approaches.