Mitigating Denial of Service Attacks using Anonymity Networks: Relationship Anonymity-Communication Overhead Trade-off

Denial-of-service attacks are a significant threat to mission critical communication infrastructures, e.g., to industrial control systems. They are relatively easy to perpetrate, as an attacker that has access to communication links or equipment could observe the source and destination addresses for every message, and can identify and discard the messages exchanged between particular communication participants. Mix networks and anonymity networks could render these attacks more difficult by providing anonymous communication via relaying. Nevertheless, relaying introduces overhead and increases the end-to-end message delivery delay, which in practice must often be low. Hence, an important question is how to optimize anonymity for limited overhead and delay. In this paper we address this question by studying two anonymity networks: MCrowds, an extension of Crowds, which provides unbounded communication delay and Minstrels, which provides bounded communication delay. We derive exact and approximate analytical expressions for the relationship anonymity for these systems. Using MCrowds and Minstrels we show that, contrary to intuition, increased overhead does not always improve anonymity. We investigate the impact of the system's parameters on anonymity and on the optimal anonymity network parameters, and the sensitivity of anonymity to the misestimation of the number of attackers.QC 201040708