TITLE: 

Exploiting the Transients of Adaptation for RoQ Attacks on Internet Resources

SPEAKER: 

         Ibrahim Matta
         Computer Science Department
         Boston University


ABSTRACT: 

Current computing systems depend on adaptation mechanisms to drive the system
into quiescent regions of operation. These regions are often characterized by
being efficient, fair and stable. Research studies have focused on developing
more sophisticated adaptation mechanisms without the proper attention to their
security aspects.  In this work, we expose vulnerabilities in adaptation
mechanisms employed in routers and end-systems against Reduction of Quality
(RoQ) attacks. Unlike traditional brute-force, sustained high-rate DoS attacks,
as well as recently proposed  low-rate Shrew attacks, RoQ attacks target the
transients of a system's adaptive behavior as opposed to its limited
steady-state capacity or its mechanism-specific setting. We show that a
well-orchestrated RoQ attack could introduce significant inefficiencies that
could potentially deprive an Internet resource from much of its capacity, or
significantly reduce its service quality, while evading detection by consuming
an unsuspicious, small fraction of that system's hijacked capacity. We develop
control-theoretic models and associated metrics to quantify these
vulnerabilities. We present numerical and simulation results, which we validate
with observations from real Internet experiments. 


Joint work with Mina Guirguis and Azer Bestavros.


BIOGRAPHY:

Ibrahim Matta received his Ph.D. in computer science from the University of
Maryland at College Park  in 1995. He is currently an associate professor at
the Computer Science Department of  Boston University. He leads the QoS
Networking Laboratory and is a member of the Web and InterNetworking Group
(WING). His research involves the design and analysis of QoS and wireless
architectures and protocols. His recent projects investigate QoS routing,
Internet topology and traffic analysis, Internet traffic controllers, and
sensor networks.

Dr. Matta received the National Science Foundation CAREER award in 1997. He was
guest co-editor of a special issue on Reliable Transport Protocols for Mobile
Computing in the Journal of Wireless Communications and Mobile Computing,
February 2002. He was also guest co-editor of a special issue on Quality of
Service Routing in the IEEE Communications Magazine, June 2002. He is currently
on the Editorial Board of the Computer Networks Journal (COMNET), and on the
Advisory Council of the IEEE International Symposium on Computers and
Communications. He is the Internet Co-chair of IEEE Infocom 2005, and the
Technical Program Co-chair of the upcoming IEEE International Conference on
Network Protocols (ICNP) 2005.

He has served on the technical program committees of many conferences including
INFOCOM, ICNP, GLOBECOM, and ICDCS. He was co-organizer and  Technical Program
Co-chair of NeXtworking 2003, a COST-IST (EU) and NSF-ANIR (USA) funded
workshop in Crete, Greece. He was co-organizer and Technical Program Chair of
the IEEE workshop on Applications and Services in Wireless Networks (ASWN)
2004. He was Technical Program Co-chair of the First International Workshop on
Wired/Wireless Internet Communications (WWIC 2002), and General Co-chair of
WWIC 2004. He was Publication Chair of IEEE INFOCOM 2003, and Tutorial and
Panel Chair of the 9th Hot Interconnects Symposium 2001. He was the
representative of the IEEE Technical Committee on Computer Communications
(TCCC) for GLOBECOM 1999. He is a member of IEEE and ACM. 

Web page at http://www.cs.bu.edu/fac/matta/