Analytical and Simulation Based Evaluation of Wireless-to-Wireline TCP-SYN Attacks

Denial of service (DoS) attacks present a serious threat to the entire Internet community, as they are very easy to implement, and yet they have the ability bring any arbitrary networked-computer to their knees by flooding them with useless traffic. Although the current volume of published research works on DoS appears significant, most of these works share two common limitations. The goal of this paper is to overcome the limitations of the previous research works on DoS, through analytical and simulation-based evaluations of one particular type of DoS attack-TCP-SYN flooding attack. In the first part of the paper, the general concept of wireless-to-wireline DoS attacks is introduced, and the unique challenges associated with this type of attack are outlined. Subsequently, a theoretical analysis concerning the actual ability of a single mobile user to stall one of three major types of Internet servers using a TCP-SYN DoS attack is presented. The results of this analysis show that TCP-SYN attacks launched from either of the existing mobile-wireless systems can stall all three types of Internet servers, and therefore they do pose a real threat to the Internet community. Nevertheless, the initiators of these attacks should not expect to remain hidden or unpunished, as the stream of forged TCP-SYN packets can effectively be traced back to the source. In the second part of the paper, a Qualnet-based simulation model for the analysis of wireless-to-wireline TCP-SYN attacks is presented. Through a series of experimental results obtained using the given model, the conclusions outlined in the first part of the paper are verified