Towards evaluating resilience of SIP server under low rate DoS attack

Abstract

Low rate Denial-of Service, DoS, attack recently emerged as the greatest threat to enterprise VoIP systems. Such attacks are difficult to detect and capable of discovering vulnerabilities in protocols with low rate traffic and it noticeably affects the performance of Session Initiation Protocol, SIP, communication. In this paper, we deeply analysis the resilience of SIP server against certain low rate DoS attacks. For this purpose we define performance metrics of SIP server under attack and non-attack scenarios. The performance degradation under attacks gives a measure of resilience of the SIP server. In order to generate normal SIP traffic and the attacks, we defined our own XML scenarios and implemented them using a popular open source tool known as SIPp. The system under evaluation was an open source SIP server. � 2011 Springer-Verlag.