Performance analysis of TCP/AQM under Low-Rate Denial-of-Service Attacks

The interactions between Active Queue Management (AQM) algorithms and TCP have been extensively investigated in the last few years. However, majority of the studies are conducted without considering the consequences of different attacks on TCP flows. This research work aims to investigate the performance of TCP flows under Low-Rate Denial-of-Service (LDoS) attacks. In particular, we have performed diverse LDoS experiments by varying critical experimental parameters in order to evaluate their effects on the performance of TCP under droptail and four other AQM algorithms. Simulation results indicate that an LDoS attack with short attack duration of ≈ 0.5 seconds produces more effective outcomes for the attacker as compared to the finding previously reported. Furthermore, the results reveal that droptail and PI are highly robust compared to the other three AQM schemes. RED was designed to bring major improvements over the simple droptail algorithm. However, simulation results show that the simple droptail algorithm outperforms RED in all of the three experiments. On the other hand, the Adaptive Virtual Queue (AVQ) algorithm shows the worst performance in the presence of LDoS attack.