An adaptive multi-agent solution to detect DoS attack in SOAP messages

Abstract

A SOAP message can be affected by a DoS attack if the incoming message has been either created or modified maliciously. The specifications of existing security standards do not focus on this type of attack. This article presents a novel distributed and adaptive approach for dealing with DoS attacks in Web Service environments, which represents an alternative to the existing centralized solutions. The solution proposes a distributed hierarchical multiagent architecture that implements a classification mechanism in two phases. The main benefits of the approach are the distributed capabilities of the multiagent systems and the self-adaption ability to the changes that occur in the patterns of attack. A prototype of the architecture was developed and the results obtained are presented in this study. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2009.