Defending web services against denial of service attacks using client puzzles
Abstract
The interoperable and loosely-coupled web services architecture, while beneficial, can be resource-intensive, and is thus susceptible to denial of service (DoS) attacks in which an attacker can use a relatively insignificant amount of resources to exhaust the computational resources of a web service. We investigate the effectiveness of defending web services from DoS attacks using client puzzles, a cryptographic countermeasure which provides a form of gradual authentication by requiring the client to solve some computationally difficult problems before access is granted. In particular, we describe a mechanism for integrating a hash-based puzzle into existing web services frameworks and analyze the effectiveness of the countermeasure using a variety of scenarios on a network testbed. Client puzzles are an effective defence against flooding attacks. They can also mitigate certain types of semantic-based attacks, although they may not be the optimal solution.
Reference
Suriadi Suriadi, Douglas Stebila, Andrew Clark, and Hua Liu. Defending web services against denial of service attacks using client puzzles. In Proc. IEEE International Conference on Web Services (ICWS) 2011, IEEE, 2011. To appear.Best paper
This paper won the Best Paper award at the conference.
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