A novel tuneable low-intensity adversarial attack

Currently, denial of service (DoS) attacks remain amongst the most critical threats to Internet applications. The goal of the attacker in a DoS attack is to overwhelm a shared resource by sending a large amount of traffic thus, rendering the resource unavailable to other legitimate users. In this paper, we expose a novel contrasting category of attacks that is aimed at exploiting the adaptive behavior exhibited by several network and system protocols such as TCP. The goal of the attacker in this case is not to entirely disable the service but to inflict sufficient degradation to the service quality experienced by legitimate users. An important property of these attacks is the fact that the desired adversarial impact can be achieved by using an non-suspicious low-rate attack stream, which can easily evade detection. Further by tuning various parameters of the attack traffic stream, the attacker can inflict varying degrees of service degradation and at the same time making it extremely difficult for the victim to detect attacker presence. Our simulation based experiments validate our observations and demonstrate that an attacker can significantly degrade the performance of the TCP flows by inducing lowrate attack traffic which is co-ordinated to exploit the congestion control behavior of TCP