Denial of Service Attacks Using Internet Key Exchange Protocol

Abstract

In this paper we answer two questions: 1) How can an attacker push the CPU utilization of a state-of-art Internet Key Exchange (IKE) responders to 100% thereby inflecting a Denial of Service (DoS) attack and 2) What are the mitigation mechanisms that can be deployed on IP networks without modifying the protocol? We emulated the DoS attacks in our test lab. We outline our experiments and present the results.