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Selective Denial of Service and Its Impact to Internet Based Information Systems

Information security has gained critical importance with the growth of Internet connected computing and business systems. Denial-of-Service (DoS) is a prime concern in information security, as evidenced by the recent attacks on popular e-commerce sites. In the information security arena DoS is a well-studied topic. However, if and when a DoS occurs, the " service " (being denied) usually becomes completely unavailable, causing what we term a " Total DoS " or T-DoS. A T-DoS, albeit serious in its effect, is readily apparent to the system under attack, and therefore prompt recovery actions can be executed. As a result, the hackers causing T-DoS cannot maintain a sustained level of harm to the users, and run a high risk of being detected. The purpose of this paper is to introduce the notion of a Selective DoS (S-DoS), which may cause equal, if not greater, harm and runs the possibility of not being easily detected. Consequently, the user may suffer from " covert " or " surreptitious " attacks. The user may not even realize a S-DoS attack has occurred until it is too late. Since S-DoS does not occur at a system wide level, the network system administrator may not detect the presence of such attacks and may not even be able to trace the attackers. S-DoS attacks, although causing a fewer number of interruptions, may be more effective at causing damage to the information systems. In this paper we will distinguish S-DoS from the existing theory of DoS. We will present a comprehensive definition of DoS, T-DoS, and S-DoS. We will discuss the application domain relevance of S-DoS with e-commerce transactions. We will show how a clever S-DoS attack can lead to an unfair advantage to a single party amongst competing e-businesses. These S-DoS attacks may be very effective at tipping the scale between competing businesses, particularly since most e-businesses probably operate with a small profit margin. We discuss the impact of S-DoS attacks on various technology domains, e.g., ATM, Switched Ethernet, Voice over IP, distributed software architecture (CORBA), etc. We discuss a prototype implementation of the S-DoS attack in a LAN. Future directions in this research area are proposed and outlined in the conclusion.