journal article·2023-10-27Open access

AccFlow: Defending against the Low-Rate TCP DoS Attack in Drones

Yuan Cao, Haotian Li, Lijuan Han, Xiaojin Zhao, Xiaofang Pan, Enyi Yao

Applied Sciences· Volume 13· Issue 21

Abstract

As drones are widely employed in various industries and daily life, concerns regarding their safety have been gradually emerging. Denial of service (DoS) attacks have become one of the most significant threats to the stability of resource-constrained sensor nodes. Traditional brute-force and high-rate distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks are easily detectable and mitigated. However, low-rate TCP DoS attacks can considerably impair TCP throughput and evade DoS prevention systems by inconspicuously consuming a small portion of network capacity, and whereas the literature offers effective defense mechanisms against DDoS attacks, there is a gap in defending against Low-Rate TCP DoS attacks. In this paper, we introduce AccFlow, an incrementally deployable Software-Defined Networking (SDN)-based protocol designed to counter low-rate TCP DoS attacks. The main idea of AccFlow is to make the attacking flows accountable for the congestion by dropping their packets according to their loss rates. AccFlow drops their packets more aggressively as the loss rates increase. Through extensive simulations, we illustrate that AccFlow can effectively safeguard against low-rate TCP DoS attacks, even when attackers employ varying strategies involving different scales and data rates. Furthermore, whereas AccFlow primarily addresses low-rate TCP DoS attacks, our research reveals its effectiveness in defending against general DoS attacks. These general attacks do not rely on the TCP retransmission timeout mechanism but rather deplete network resources, ultimately resulting in a denial of service for legitimate users. Additionally, we delve into the scalability of AccFlow and its viability for practical deployment in real-world networks. Finally, we demonstrate the effectiveness of AccFlow in safeguarding network resources.
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Research context

OpenAlex topics: Software-Defined Networks and 5G · Network Security and Intrusion Detection · Internet Traffic Analysis and Secure E-voting

SciVX discovery tags are terminology-based. OpenAlex topics are source-provided classifications.

Affiliations

The College of Information Science and Engineering, Hohai University, Changzhou 213022, China

The College of Electronic Science and Technology, Shenzhen University, Shenzhen 518060, China

The College of Information Engineering, Shenzhen University, Shenzhen 518060, China

School of Microelectronics, South China University of Technology, Guangzhou 511442, China

Funding

National Natural Science Foundation of China · Guangdong Basic and Applied Basic Research Foundation · the Open Fund of Advanced Cryptography and System Security Key Laboratory of Sichuan Province · Key Research and Development Program of Jiangsu Province · Postdoctoral Science Foundation of Jiangsu Province

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