High Fidelity Denial of Service (DoS) Experimentation

Experimentation with security attacks introduces additional requirements compared to traditional networking and distributed system experiments. High capacity attack flows can push systems beyond their expected operational regions, and expose unexpected behaviors. Many popular simulation and emulation environments fail to account for such behaviors, and incorrect results have been reported based on experiments conducted in these environments. In addition, simulation and emulation environments sometimes introduce artifacts, altering the experimental outcome and its interpretation. Finally, identification of systems settings that significantly impact experimental results is crucial for creating repeatable experiments. This paper presents the results of a careful sensitivity analysis they have conducted, which exposes difficulties in obtaining meaningful measurements from three emulation testbeds.