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Evaluation of puzzle-enabled proxy-assisted denial-of-service protection for web services

Denial-of-service (DoS) attacks are a fast growing, severe menace to the availability of desired services. In this work, we investigate the efficacy of a cryptographic DoS countermeasure, namely, client puzzles which can be used to achieve a weak authentication as it forces the client to solve a somewhat-difficult computational problem in order to get serviced. We aim to make a web service more resilient to DoS attacks by using a reverse proxy between clients and the service provider. Unlike previous works, we integrate puzzles into reverse proxy and demonstrate that the proposed approach is indeed effective and advantageous in protecting the web servers from both flooding and semantic-type attacks.