Secure Overlay Services (SOS): A critical analysis

Due to increased use of the internet for various time critical applications such as banks, power stations, mission critical applications and even our defense system its unavailability greatly hinders our day to day operations. We all know that the biggest threat to the availability of internet is Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack. The objective of DDoS attack is to consume the target´s resources to such an extent that it becomes incapable to serve legitimate clients. Till date, a wide variety of solutions have been proposed to solve this problem but a very few of them concentrate on protecting critical infrastructures. Secure Overlay Services (SOS) architecture acts as a basis to protect all these time critical applications. It proactively prevents the target by providing layers of security between the authenticated client and the protected target. Although SOS architecture is successful in complicating the job of attacker, but still it is vulnerable to various attacks. Various researchers critically study this architecture and discuss various attacks possible on it. The aim of this paper is to review various attacks possible on this architecture so that more detailed understanding of attacker´s strategy can be achieved and use this knowledge to develop more robust solutions.