The Greenhouse Effect Attack

A simple Denial-of-Service (DoS) attack is ICMP flooding, i.e. overwhelming the victim with ICMP Echo Request packets: by soliciting ICMP Echo Reply responses, the attacker aims at consuming CPU cycles as well as incoming and outgoing bandwidth of the victim. In this work, we present an evolution of this basic attack, we named Greenhouse Effect Attack (GEA): the attacker issues exactly the same amount of ICMP Echo Request packets of the basic ICMP flooding attack but inducing the victim to handle double of the requests. This result is achieved transparently by making the routers of the victim´s network effective yet unaware agents of the attacker.