Abstract
The objective of this work is to take a first step to close this fundamental gap, aiming at laying a foundation that can be used in future computer/network designs taking into account the malicious users. Our approach is based on proposing a metric that evaluates the vulnerability of a system. We then evaluate the commonly used data structure in network mechanisms, the hash data structure, using our vulnerability metric. We show that a Closed Hash is much more vulnerable than an Open Hash to DDoS attacks, even though the two systems are considered to be equivalent via traditional performance evaluation. We also apply the metric to queuing mechanisms common to computer and communications systems. Lastly we apply it to the practical case of a hash table whose requests are controlled by a queue, showing that even after the attack has ended, the regular users still suffer from performance degradation or even a total denial of service.
