Exploiting the Congestion Control Behavior of the Transmission Control Protocol

摘要

This paper presents a realistic method for exploiting an already known insecurity of the Congestion Control behavior of the Transmission Control Protocol that was originally pointed out in 1999 [11] and that affects all known TCP implementations. This insecurity exploits the fundamental assumption of TCP that the communicating remote end is trustworthy and is behaving correctly. We developed a methodology and an algorithm which we used to attack a web server and deceive it in transmitting with a constant rate of 900Mbits per second. During the attack the server was incapable of reacting to the network congestion it caused.