A queuing analysis for low-rate DoS attacks against application servers

In this paper, we study a kind of low-rate denial of server attacks against application servers (LoRDAS), which exploit the bugs in application-level protocols, and unlike high-rate attacks, have high concealment and fraudulence performance. Although the strategy and the effect have been studied before, the limitation of their analysis is the static view, which offers inaccuracy. Therefore, we observe and study the attack in a global view. We take the attack as a separate process, concerning the changing stages and the corresponding different attack strategies. In addition, some possible improvement mechanisms are contributed. At last, we present a queue model for the attack process, which can characterize the dynamic behavior accurately. Moreover, by computing the probability distribution of this queue system, we evaluate the degree of effect the attackers can bring about at different network traffic rates. By experimental analysis our model is proved appropriate. We hope our studies could provide some help for the further research of defense techniques.