Dependable connection setup for network capabilities

Network-layer capabilities offer strong protection against link flooding by authorizing individual flows with unforgeable credentials (i.e., capabilities). However, the capability-setup channel is vulnerable to flooding attacks that prevent legitimate clients from acquiring capabilities; i.e., in Denial of Capability (DoC) attacks. Based on the observation that the distribution of attack sources in the current Internet is highly non-uniform, we provide a router-level scheme that confines the effects of DoC attacks to specified locales or neighborhoods (e.g., one or more administrative domains of the Internet). Our scheme provides precise access guarantees for capability schemes, even in the face of flooding attacks. The effectiveness of our scheme is evaluated by ns2 simulations under different attack scenarios.