Measurement of Denial of Service Attacks Using New Metrics

In this paper, we propose a novel, user-centric approach to DoS impact measurement. Our key insight is that DoS always causes degradation of service quality, and a metric that holistically captures a human user’s QoS perception will be applicable to all test scenarios. For each popular application, we specify its QoS requirements, consisting of relevant traffic measurements and corresponding thresholds that define good service ranges. We observe traffic as a collection of high-level tasks, called “transactions”. Each legitimate transaction is evaluated against its application’s QoS requirements; transactions that do not meet all the requirements are considered “failed". We aggregate information about transaction failure into several intuitive qualitative and quantitative composite metrics to expose the precise interaction of the DoS attack with the legitimate traffic.