Homework #1 - Denial-of-Service - Due Thursday Jan 23, 1PM

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

Homeworks are done in pairs of two students.

Please note logistics on turning in assignments:

  1. In your answers, please keep the numbers identifying the different parts of the assignment.
  2. I prefer that you don't copy the text of the questions themselves into your answers, just the numbers.
  3. Plain text, HTML or Word.
  4. Do not include your names in your email body, so only the From address is identifying.
  5. Cc the other student of your pair.

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. Do either of the following:

    1. 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. If you used external reseources, provide links/cites.

    2. Locate a more recent paper in the area of denial-of-service that you find interesting. Give its title, authors, publication information (venue and year), 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.