Exposing and Eliminating Vulnerabilities to Denial of Service Attacks in Secure Gossip-Based Multicast

This paper proposes a framework and methodology for quantifying the effect of Denial of Service (DoS) attacks on a distributed system. They present a systematic study of the resistance of gossip-based multicast protocols to DoS attacks. They show that even distributed and randomized gossip-based protocols, which eliminate single points of failure, do not necessarily eliminate vulnerabilities to DoS attacks. They propose Drum - a simple gossip-based multicast protocol that eliminates such vulnerabilities. Drum was implemented in Java and tested on a large cluster. They show, using closed-form mathematical analysis, simulations, and empirical tests, that Drum survives severe DoS attacks.