Denial-of-Service attacks on web servers take many forms. In this paper, we look at a new breed of application-level attacks. An attacker compromises a large number of dummy clients (by means of a worm, virus or Trojan horse) and causes the clients to \ufb02ood the web server with well-formed HTTP requests that download large \ufb01les or generate complex database queries. Such requests cause the web server to expend costly server resources like sockets, disk bandwidth, database sub-system bandwidth and worker processes on these dummy users. As a result, performance seen by legitimate users will degrade, eventually leading to denial of service. These attacks are hard to counter as the malicious requests are indistinguishable from legitimate requests at the server. Further, the dummy requests arrive from a large number of geographically distributed machines; thus, they cannot be \ufb01ltered on source IP addresses or arrival patterns. Prior work has looked at network\/transport level DDoS attacks such as SYN \ufb02ood and bandwidth attacks [1] and proposed a few solutions [2], [3]. We assume that a subset of these solutions protect a web server from both SYN \ufb02ood and bandwidth attacks and focus on application-level attacks.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Denial-of-Service attacks on web servers take many forms. In this paper, we look at a new breed of application-level attacks. An attacker compromises a large number of dummy clients (by means of a worm, virus or Trojan horse) and causes the clients to \ufb02ood the web server with well-formed HTTP requests that download large \ufb01les […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":0,"template":"","meta":{"msr-url-field":"","msr-podcast-episode":"","msrModifiedDate":"","msrModifiedDateEnabled":false,"ep_exclude_from_search":false,"_classifai_error":"","msr-author-ordering":null,"msr_publishername":"Association for Computing Machinery, Inc.","msr_publisher_other":"","msr_booktitle":"","msr_chapter":"","msr_edition":"SOSP 2003 Work-in-progress Session","msr_editors":"","msr_how_published":"","msr_isbn":"","msr_issue":"","msr_journal":"","msr_number":"","msr_organization":"","msr_pages_string":"","msr_page_range_start":"","msr_page_range_end":"","msr_series":"","msr_volume":"","msr_copyright":"Copyright \u00a9 2007 by the Association for Computing Machinery, Inc. Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, to republish, to post on servers, or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and\/or a fee. Request permissions from Publications Dept, ACM Inc., fax +1 (212) 869-0481, or permissions@acm.org. The definitive version of this paper can be found at ACM's Digital Library --http:\/\/www.acm.org\/dl\/.","msr_conference_name":"","msr_doi":"","msr_arxiv_id":"","msr_s2_paper_id":"","msr_mag_id":"","msr_pubmed_id":"","msr_other_authors":"Shan Sinha, Dina Katabi, Matthias Jacob","msr_other_contributors":"","msr_speaker":"","msr_award":"","msr_affiliation":"","msr_institution":"","msr_host":"","msr_version":"","msr_duration":"","msr_original_fields_of_study":"","msr_release_tracker_id":"","msr_s2_match_type":"","msr_citation_count_updated":"","msr_published_date":"2003-10-01","msr_highlight_text":"","msr_notes":"SOSP 2003 Work-in-progress Session","msr_longbiography":"","msr_publicationurl":"","msr_external_url":"","msr_secondary_video_url":"","msr_conference_url":"","msr_journal_url":"","msr_s2_pdf_url":"","msr_year":2003,"msr_citation_count":0,"msr_influential_citations":0,"msr_reference_count":0,"msr_s2_match_confidence":0,"msr_microsoftintellectualproperty":true,"msr_s2_open_access":false,"msr_s2_author_ids":[],"msr_pub_ids":[],"msr_hide_image_in_river":0,"footnotes":""},"msr-research-highlight":[],"research-area":[13558,13547],"msr-publication-type":[193724],"msr-publisher":[],"msr-focus-area":[],"msr-locale":[268875],"msr-post-option":[],"msr-field-of-study":[],"msr-conference":[],"msr-journal":[],"msr-impact-theme":[],"msr-pillar":[],"class_list":["post-156569","msr-research-item","type-msr-research-item","status-publish","hentry","msr-research-area-security-privacy-cryptography","msr-research-area-systems-and-networking","msr-locale-en_us"],"msr_publishername":"Association for Computing Machinery, Inc.","msr_edition":"SOSP 2003 Work-in-progress Session","msr_affiliation":"","msr_published_date":"2003-10-01","msr_host":"","msr_duration":"","msr_version":"","msr_speaker":"","msr_other_contributors":"","msr_booktitle":"","msr_pages_string":"","msr_chapter":"","msr_isbn":"","msr_journal":"","msr_volume":"","msr_number":"","msr_editors":"","msr_series":"","msr_issue":"","msr_organization":"","msr_how_published":"","msr_notes":"SOSP 2003 Work-in-progress Session","msr_highlight_text":"","msr_release_tracker_id":"","msr_original_fields_of_study":"","msr_download_urls":"","msr_external_url":"","msr_secondary_video_url":"","msr_longbiography":"","msr_microsoftintellectualproperty":1,"msr_main_download":"210177","msr_publicationurl":"","msr_doi":"","msr_publication_uploader":[{"type":"file","title":"kandula_wip.pdf","viewUrl":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/02\/kandula_wip.pdf","id":210177,"label_id":0}],"msr_related_uploader":"","msr_citation_count":0,"msr_citation_count_updated":"","msr_s2_paper_id":"","msr_influential_citations":0,"msr_reference_count":0,"msr_arxiv_id":"","msr_s2_author_ids":[],"msr_s2_open_access":false,"msr_s2_pdf_url":null,"msr_attachments":[{"id":210177,"url":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/02\/kandula_wip.pdf"}],"msr-author-ordering":[{"type":"user_nicename","value":"srikanth","user_id":33707,"rest_url":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/microsoft-research\/v1\/researchers?person=srikanth"},{"type":"text","value":"Shan Sinha","user_id":0,"rest_url":false},{"type":"text","value":"Dina Katabi","user_id":0,"rest_url":false},{"type":"text","value":"Matthias Jacob","user_id":0,"rest_url":false}],"msr_impact_theme":[],"msr_research_lab":[],"msr_event":[],"msr_group":[144899],"msr_project":[],"publication":[],"video":[],"msr-tool":[],"msr_publication_type":"miscellaneous","related_content":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-research-item\/156569","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-research-item"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/msr-research-item"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-research-item\/156569\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":412127,"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-research-item\/156569\/revisions\/412127"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=156569"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"msr-research-highlight","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-research-highlight?post=156569"},{"taxonomy":"msr-research-area","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/research-area?post=156569"},{"taxonomy":"msr-publication-type","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-publication-type?post=156569"},{"taxonomy":"msr-publisher","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-publisher?post=156569"},{"taxonomy":"msr-focus-area","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-focus-area?post=156569"},{"taxonomy":"msr-locale","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-locale?post=156569"},{"taxonomy":"msr-post-option","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-post-option?post=156569"},{"taxonomy":"msr-field-of-study","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-field-of-study?post=156569"},{"taxonomy":"msr-conference","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-conference?post=156569"},{"taxonomy":"msr-journal","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-journal?post=156569"},{"taxonomy":"msr-impact-theme","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-impact-theme?post=156569"},{"taxonomy":"msr-pillar","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-pillar?post=156569"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}