A cost-based framework for analysis of denial of service in networks

Article type: Research Article

Authors: Meadows, Catherine

Affiliations: Code 5543, Naval Research Laboratory, Washington, DC 20375, USA. E-mail: meadows@itd.nrl.navy.mil

Abstract: Denial of service is becoming a growing concern. As computer systems communicate more and more with others that they know less and less, they become increasingly vulnerable to hostile intruders who may take advantage of the very protocols intended for the establishment and authentication of communication to tie up resources and disable servers. This paper shows how some principles that have already been used to make cryptographic protocols more resistant to denial of service by trading off the cost to defender against the cost to the attacker can be formalized based on a modification of the Gong–Syverson fail-stop model of cryptographic protocols, and indicates the ways in which existing cryptographic protocol analysis tools could be modified to operate within this formal framework. We also indicate how this framework could be extended to protocols that do not make use of strong authentication.

DOI: 10.3233/JCS-2001-91-206

Journal: Journal of Computer Security, vol. 9, no. 1-2, pp. 143-164, 2001