2010/03/01 by Michael Walfish, Mythili Vutukuru, Hari Balakrishnan +2 · 1 citation
Computer Science · #Network Security and Intrusion Detection #Advanced Malware Detection Techniques #Internet Traffic Analysis and Secure E-voting
paper · doi:10.1145/1731060.1731063
openalex publication_date 2010/03/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/01
This article presents the design, implementation, analysis, and experimental evaluation of speak-up , a defense against application-level distributed denial-of-service (DDoS), in which attackers cripple a server by sending legitimate-looking requests that consume computational resources (e.g., CPU cycles, disk). With speak-up, a victimized server encourages all clients, resources permitting, to automatically send higher volumes of traffic . We suppose that attackers are already using most of their upload bandwidth so cannot react to the encouragement. Good clients, however, have spare upload bandwidth so can react to the encouragement with drastically higher volumes of traffic. The intended outcome of this traffic inflation is that the good clients crowd out the bad ones, thereby capturing a much larger fraction of the server's resources than before. We experiment under various conditions and find that speak-up causes the server to spend resources on a group of clients in rough proportion to their aggregate upload bandwidths, which is the intended result.