Project: No denial: mitigation of volumetric denial of service attacks

Gunnar Karlsson

PhD student, 5 years, starting 2025.

Denial of service is a most generic form of attack that spans from jamming radio channels to overloading application servers. The attack is accomplished by overloading a critical resource, such as a communication link, a forwarding function in a router, or the server capacity in a host. The overload may be generated by a large number of coordinated devices, possibly simple ones, making it hard to detect the attack close to the sources where the flows appear innocuous. But attacks may also be launched from rented cloud computing services which provide ample resources at low cost.

In this project, we will study overload primarily on the link (referred to as link-flooding attacks), network and transport layers. However unsophisticated as they may appear, volumetric denial of service attacks are still a threat to network operations. Mitigating actions are either targeted at the sources to stop the flows, or applied in the network and at the hosts. Here we will address the problem by studying solutions that may be deployed in networks and in targeted hosts, thus not concerning ourselves with the complementary problem of tracing an attack back towards the senders.

It is our basic tenet that the severe problem of denial of service attacks requires many component solutions to be combined into efficient defence strategies. The aim is to study traffic control strategies and their possible role for mitigation of denial of service attacks.