Mathematical Foundations for the Design of a Low-Rate DoS Attack to Iterative Servers (Short Paper)

A low-rate DoS attack to iterative servers has recently appeared as a new approach for defeating services using rates of traffic that could be adjusted to bypass security detection mechanisms. Although the fundamentals and effectiveness of these kind of attacks are known, it is not clear how to design the attack to achieve specific constraints based on the used rate and the efficiency in denial of service obtained. In this paper, a comprehensive mathematical framework that models the behaviour of the attack is presented. The main contribution of this model is to give a better understanding of the dynamics of these kind of attacks, in order to facilitate the development of detection and defense mechanisms.