A LocationGuard Approach: An Efficacious Scheme to Alleviate DoS Attacks

Abstract

CFS, Farsite, and OceanStore file systems store files on a large collection of untrusted nodes that form an overlay network. They use cryptographic techniques to maintain file confidentiality and integrity from malicious nodes. Unfortunately, cryptographic techniques cannot protect a file holder from a denial-of- service (DoS) attack or a host compromise attack. Hence, most of these distributed file systems are vulnerable to targeted file attacks, wherein a n adversary attempts to attack a small (chosen) set of files by attacking the nodes that host them. This paper presents Location Guard—a location hiding technique for securing overlay file storage systems from targeted file attacks. Location Guard ha s three essential components: 1) location key , consisting of a random bit string (eg .,128 bits) that serves as the key to the location of a file, 2) routing guard, a secure algorithm that protects accesses to a file in the overlay network given its location key such that neither its key nor its location is revealed to an adversary, and 3) a set of location inference guards, which refer to an extensible component of the LocationGuard. Our experimental results quantify the overhead of employing LocationGuard and demonstrate its effectiveness against DoS attacks, host compromise attacks, and various location inference attacks.

 

 

 

Keywords: Denial-of-service attacks; overlay networks; file system; location hiding; performance and scalability.