DoS resilience of real time streaming protocol

Denial of Service (DoS) attacks on a computer system or network cause loss of service to users typically by flooding a victim with many requests or by disrupting the connections between two machines. Although significant amount of work has been done on DoS attacks, DoS attacks on streaming video servers were not investigated in detail. In this paper, we investigate DoS resilience of Real Time Streaming Protocol (RTSP). We show that by using a simple command line tool that opens a large number of RTSP connections, we can launch DoS attacks on the server and the proxy. We discuss in detail how the CPU and the memory resources are affected by the attacks. We observe that, with the DoS attack we launch, clients can also keep the connections alive for a long period and maintain the resources allocated at the server. We propose a lightweight dynamic detection framework for the RTSP based DoS attacks.