The coremelt attack

Abstract

Current Denial-of-Service (DoS) attacks are directed towards a specific victim. The research community has devised several countermeasures that protect the victim host against undesired traffic. We present Coremelt, a new attack mechanism, where attackers only send traffic between each other, and not towards a victim host. As a result, none of the attack traffic is unwanted. The Coremelt attack is powerful because among N attackers, there are O(N 2) connections, which cause significant damage in the core of the network. We demonstrate the attack based on simulations within a real Internet topology using realistic attacker distributions and show that attackers can induce a significant amount of congestion. © 2009 Springer Berlin Heidelberg.