Calculating Distributed Denial of Service Attack Probability in Bloom-Filter based Information-Centric Networks

Abstract Information-Centric Networking (ICN) is an emerging networking technology that has been designed to directly operate on named content/information objects, rather than relying on the knowledge of the content location. According to the ICN principles, a user requests the information object by its name or some other form of object identifier. After that, the ICN system is responsible for finding the particular object and sending it back to the user. Despite a large number of works on ICN in recent years, ICN systems still face security challenges. This is especially true when considering different types of alternative networks, such as the wireless community networks (WCNs). In this work, we explore the applicability of ICN principles in the challenging and unpredictable environments of WCNs. We consider stateless content dissemination using Bloom filters (BFs) and analyze two BF based approaches: the traditional single-stage BF and its generalization, the multi-stage BF. We focus on the security aspects of BF based approaches and in particular on distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks. Finally, we investigate the attack probability for various system and network parameters, such as the number of hash functions, the BF maximum fill factor, and the number of hops toward the victim node.