DoS Attacks on Real-Time Media through Indirect Contention-in-Hosts

Quality of service (QoS) is critical for delivering real-time media services (RTMSs). The authors identify a new class of denial-of-service attacks against RTMSs - indirect contention-in-hosts (ICiH). Here, attackers attempt to indirectly degrade RTMS QoS by directing packets at other concurrent services, thereby inducing resource contention between RTMS packets and attack packets in the protocol stack. To analyze such attacks, the authors' operation-trace analysis method formalizes the notion of contention among concurrent services and develops several metrics to quantify ICiH's effects.