Homework #1 - Denial-of-Service - Due Tuesday Aug 31, 1PM

Turn in this assignment via email (vern@cs.berkeley.edu, plain text preferred) by the due date, with the term Homework in the Subject.

Part 1

Look over the course syllabus to see which topics/papers will most likely be covered. Send me via email your ordered preferences for topic briefing (see the home page for a corresponding description).

Complete the background survey.

Subscribe to the mailing list.

Part 2

Read the paper Inferring Internet Denial of Service Activity, David Moore, Geoffrey Voelker, and Stefan Savage, USENIX Security 2001.

Briefly write up your views of:

  1. What are the main contributions of this paper?
  2. What parts of the paper do you find unclear? (optional)
  3. What parts of the paper are questionable? (That is, you think a conclusion may be wrong, an approach or evaluation technically flawed, or data ill-presented.)
  4. Frame a particular denial-of-service problem for which you believe you have an effective defense/remedy. Briefly discuss your proposed approach in terms of how it works, what it costs, its limitations, and how an attacker might subvert it.
  5. Locate a more recent paper in the same area that you find interesting. Give its title and a URL to the text. From a skim, briefly discuss the paper's relevance to the problem of denial-of-service and/or the assigned paper in particular, and explain why you find this additional paper interesting.