ABSTRACT

One of the most critical problems in Internet security is
the Denial-of-Service (DoS) attack, which aims to make a
service unavailable to legitimate clients. In this project,
we consider a sophisticated attack, called service-level DoS
attack, which is very difficult to identify as malicious
requests can be made arbitrarily similar to legitimate ones
and can bypass the network-based defense systems. We propose
a novel framework to detect the attackers based on the group
testing (GT) technique which can overcome the limitations of
current detection approaches. More specifically, this project
seeks to investigate the following challenges: 1) Dynamic
threshold model is studied to handle the legitimate bursts
and variance in the number of clients on each server; 2)
Legitimates and malicious requests are similar, required
new testing design without examining each request one by
one or tightly specifying legitimate behaviors; 3) In
addition, the study of the proposed model evokes a new
type of GT, called Size Constraint Group Testing (SCGT)
which requires an in depth analysis of matrix construction
complexity. This mathematically rigorous framework helps
to minimize the false positive and false negative of detection,
which is the main problem currently for any existing defense
mechanisms.

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