Downscaling Network Scenarios with Denial of Service (DoS) Attacks

A major challenge that researchers face in studying denial of service (DoS) attacks is the size of the network to be investigated. A typical DoS attack usually takes place over a large portion of the Internet and involves a considerable number of hosts. This can be intractable for testbed experimentation, and even simulation. Therefore, it is important to simplify a network scenario with DoS attacks before applying it to a simulation/testbed platform. Several approaches have been proposed in the literature to downscale a network scenario, while preserving certain critical properties. In this paper, we investigate via simulations the applicability of packet-level downscaling approaches to DoS scenarios. We select two representative methods: SHRiNK and TranSim. Our experiments identify the operational range of the two downscaling approaches, and propose guidelines for researches to select the most suitable downscaling approach for for their own research.