On Communication Effectiveness of DoS-Resilient Adaptive Port Hopping

Report, 2011

Many network-based applications commonly open some known port(s) to communicate with their users, thus making themselves vulnerable to Denial of Service (DoS) attacks. With the purpose of solving this problem, a ``pseudo-random port-hopping'' approach was suggested by Badishi et al. and extended by Fu et al. to work for multi-peer applications in the presence of clock drifts. The suggested solution gives a synchronization algorithm which enables the clients and servers to communicate via communication ports changing periodically. Complementing the analytical study of the earlier work, here we study experimentally the effect of the combined parameter variations. We study the overhead and the efficiency of the algorithm in the presence of constant and various clock drifts, as well as the communication effectiveness under various attack conditions. We conclude that the algorithm's behavior follows the earlier analysis, even under situations of stress, e.g. large and even varying clock drifts.