Some improvements to the cost-based framework for analyzing denial of service attacks

Abstract

Recently, people are paying more attention to formalizing and analyzing Denial of Service (DoS) attacks, but the known analysis models are either not precise enough or not readily used in an automatic way. In this paper, we make some improvements to the cost-based framework proposed by Meadows that aims to formalize DoS attacks. After improvement, the framework models intruders and protocols faithfully in CoreASM, and in a more accurate way in specification. Besides, the analysis can be performed automatically. In the improvements, a more flexible tolerance relation is defined so that the analysis result is in a broad form rather than merely binary as in previous works. Also, concrete values are used for representing the operational costs so as to make cost functions more precise and flexible in analysis. In this paper, the JFKi protocol is automatically analyzed as an indication of the advantages of the improvements. It explores the vulnerability that was previously found manually. The discussion on the JFKi protocol shows some difficulties in designing and analyzing DoS-resistent protocols. © 2012 Springer-Verlag.