Denial of Service Attacks in Networks with Tiny Buffers

Recently, several papers have studied the possibility of shrinking buffer sizes in Internet core routers to just a few dozen packets under certain constraints. If proven right, these results can open doors to building all-optical routers, since a major bottleneck in building such routers is the lack of large optical memories. However, reducing buffer sizes might pose new security risks: it is much easier to fill up tiny buffers, and thus organizing Denial of Service (DoS) attacks seems easier in a network with tiny buffers. To the best of our knowledge, such risks have not been studied before; all the focus has been on performance issues such as throughput, drop rate, and flow completion times. In this paper, we study DoS attacks in the context of networks with tiny buffers. We show that even though it is easier to fill up tiny buffers, synchronizing flows is more difficult. Therefore to reduce the network throughput, the attacker needs to utilize attacks with high packet injection rates. Since such attacks are easily detected, we conclude that DoS attacks are in fact more difficult in networks with tiny buffers.