Amplification DoS Attacks

Reflection DoS attacks

An amplification attack is a volumetric DoS attack with amplification and reflection characteristics. Reflection is achieved by source IP address spoofing, while amplification is accomplished by mostly exploiting UPD-based protocols that provide a much larger than the request response.

The aim of an amplification DoS attack is to saturate the bandwidth of the victim with numerous and large in size packets. It targets mainly the network layer of TCP/IP protocol stack (Layer 3 of OSI model), but it can be used as an attack vector for all the above layers too depending on whether the victim hosts the same service as the protocol exploited for amplification. Overall, such an attack combines the characteristics of reflection and amplification (Ryba et al., 2015), namely, it induces the aggressive reply traffic stemming from tiny but legitimate requests initiated by the machines controlled by the aggressors to be redirected...

Authors and Affiliations

1. Department of Information Security and Communication Technology, Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Gjøvik, Norway

   Marios Anagnostopoulos

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Marios Anagnostopoulos .

Editors and Affiliations

1. Center for Secure Information Systems, George Mason University, Fairfax, VA, VA, USA

   Sushil Jajodia

2. University of Milan, Milan, Italy

   Pierangela Samarati

3. Google Inc, New York, NY, USA

   Moti Yung

1. Computer Science Department, Stony Brook University, Stony Brook, NY, USA

   Michalis Polychronakis

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