Basic Review of Low Rate Denial of Service Attack on Wired and Wireless Networks

Denial of service (DoS) attack is a serious security threat in networks. It threatens the normal operation of networks by consuming their underlying links/channels bandwidths, devices’ memory and CPU cycles, and then denies access to network resources to legitimate users. In this paper a special type of DoS attacks is investigated, the low rate DoS (LR-DoS) attack. LR-DoS attack is unique in that it is easy to launch and automated, hard to detect and respond to. LR-DoS attack mainly targeted the normal operation of network protocols and services. LR-DoS attack utilizes vulnerabilities in the targeted network protocol and service. TCP targeted LR-DoS attack in wired networks and routing protocol targeted LR-DoS attack in wireless networks are reviewed. It was shown that to launch a successful LR-DoS attack in wired and wireless network, a deep understanding of the internal operations and timer-based strategies are needed for the targeted network protocols and services in any layer of the Internet protocol stack.