An Integrated Denial of Service (DoS) Mitigation Scheme for Tactical Networks

The increased deployment of wireless network technologies in Net-Centric Warfare(NCW) is facing a challenging requirement of security. Denial of Service(DoS) is such a security threat that cannot be simply addressed through conventional security mechanisms. In reality, DoS is an easy attack which can be launched by an inexperienced attacker, but may cause significant system performance degradation. Therefore, to ensure secure and reliable “mission-critical” information delivery in the NCW systems, we propose an integrated DoS mitigation solution. Although an increasing research interest has been shown on the DoS issue in wireless networks in the last decade, most of existing approaches only tackle particular aspect of the overall DoS problem. This work aims to address the DoS attack from a system aspect and design an integrated scheme by adopting three commonly used defense strategies in our daily life as well as warfare. Accordingly we propose three DoS mitigation strategies and organize them into a pipeline structure, namely, DoS prevention, DoS detection and DoS response. Two specific wireless standards are considered, IEEE802.11 and IEEE802.15.4. The central theme of our effort is to provide an inexpensive and compatible solution, which can be easily deployed in real systems to secure wireless transmission in tactical networks.