Botz-4-Sale: Surviving Organized DDoS Attacks That Mimic Flash Crowds Srikanth Kandula, Dina Katabi, Matthias Jacob, and Arthur Berger Awarded Best Student Paper! (NSDI-2005) Defense by Manan Sanghi
Flash Crowd
DDOS
Botz-4-Sale request
Botz-4-Sale Reverse Turing test
Botz-4-Sale Solution
Botz-4-Sale Welcome! HTTP cookie Allows at most 8 simultaneous connections Valid for 30 minutes
Botz-4-Sale request
Botz-4-Sale Reverse Turing test
Botz-4-Sale request
Botz-4-Sale System is Busy, either solve puzzle or try later
Botz-4-Sale request
Botz-4-Sale Reverse Turing test
Botz-4-Sale request
Botz-4-Sale System is Busy, either solve puzzle or try later
Botz-4-Sale Request …
Botz-4-Sale
Kill-Bots Overview Graphical Puzzles served during Stage 1
Example Normal Load 40% K 1 =70% K 2 =50% Time out (5 minutes) unauthenticated users
Two stages in Suspected Attack Mode Stage 1: CAPTCHA based Authentication No state maintenance before authentication HTTP cookie Cryptographic support Stage 2: Authenticating users who do not answer CAPTCHA No more reverse Turing tests Bloom filters to filter out over-zealous zombies
Resource Allocation and Admission Control Tradeoff Authenticate new clients Serve already authenticated clients
Adaptive Admission Control Cute Queuing Theory type analysis
Security Analysis Socially-engineered Attacks Copy Attacks Including IP address in one-way hash does not deal well with proxies and mobile users Replay Attacks Time information in the cookie hash DoS attacks on the authentication mechanism No connection state for unauthenticated clients In-kernel HTTP header processing HTTP headers not parsed Pattern match arguments to GET and Cookie fields Cost : less than 8 s
System Architecture
Evaluation – Experimental Setup
Evaluation
Evaluation - Microbenchmarks
Evaluation- CyberSlam attacks
Evaluation – Flash Crowds
On Admission Control Authentication is not sufficient Good performance requires admission control
Threat Model Bandwidth floods, DNS entries, routing entries not considered Attacker cannot sniff legitimate users’ packets Attacker cannot access server’s local network Zombies are not as smart as humans Attacker does not have a large number of humans aiding his evil plans