Timed CP-Nets Based RoQ Attack Modeling and System Defense Analysis

Current computing systems often employ sophisticated adaptation mechanisms that enable them to deal with overload conditions. Reduction of Quality (RoQ) attack, a novel category of attack being proposed recently, which exploits the adaptive behavior exhibited by various adaptation mechanisms, can cause different forms of damages to the victim system. For the widely used of adaptation mechanisms, RoQ attack can be a critical threat to the Internet. To better analyze the characteristics of RoQ attack and find efficient defense method, an attack modeling and system defense analysis method based on Timed Colored Petri nets (TCPN) is proposed in this paper. Most traditional network attack simulation methods although can simulate the network behavior realistically, they are not capable of simulate the complicated behavior of victim systems, hence can not be used to support the victim-side defense design efficiently. Based on the strong capacity in expression of colored petri nets, our method is more suitable for modeling dynamic behavior of complex system. With this approach, TCPN is used to describe the behavior of network normal traffic, RoQ attacker and victim system. According to the simulation analysis, we also propose an automated on-line defense scheme based on Adaptative Resource Investment. Simulation experiments show that this scheme can reduce the impact of RoQ attack on targeted system efficiently.