Temporal lensing and its application in pulsing denial-of-service attacks

Abstract

We introduce 'temporal lensing': a technique that concentrates a relatively low-bandwidth flood into a short, high-bandwidth pulse. By leveraging existing DNS infrastructure, we experimentally explore lensing and the properties of the pulses it creates. We also empirically show how attackers can use lensing alone to achieve peak bandwidths more than an order of magnitude greater than their upload bandwidth. While formidable by itself in a pulsing DoS attack, attackers can also combine lensing with amplification to potentially produce pulses with peak bandwidths orders of magnitude larger than their own.