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

One important class of security threats, Denial of Service (DoS) caused by the commodity of shared wireless medium is not fully addressable through conventional security mechanisms. In reality, DoS is such an easy attack which can be launched by an inexperienced attacker, but may cause significant system performance degradation, or even network partition and failure. Therefore, to ensure accurate, secure, and reliable “mission-critical” information delivery in the Network Centric Warfare systems, DoS attacks have to be further addressed. In this proposal, Intelligent Automation, Inc. (IAI) and its subcontractor, Professor Yang Xiao from the University of Alabama propose an integrated pipeline structure to mitigate the effects of DoS attacks, including DoS prevention, DoS detection and DoS response components. For each component, a set of DoS mitigation mechanisms are designed. One significant advantage of the proposed scheme is that it adopts the common defense strategies used in our daily life as well as the military war. In simple words, if A tries to fight with B, there are three approaches that B can do: 1) build high defense guard, 2) fight back when unavoidable, 3) escape when facing with unbeatable enemy. The three functional components in our proposed scheme correspond to these three defense strategies.