RSA ontwikkelt oplossing voor DDoS attacks

CyberJunk86 brengt ons een linkje naar deze press release van RSA Security, waarin het bedrijf bekend maakt dat het een cryptografisch medicijntje voor DoS aanvallen in ontwikkeling heeft. De oplossing die RSA Laboratories voor ogen heeft maakt gebruik van het 'client puzzle' protocol en lijkt best wel snugger in elkaar te steken:

This new cryptographic countermeasure employed using client puzzles is designed to allow servers to accept connection requests normally when there is no evidence of an attack, but during an attack would only selectively accept requests. Specifically, the server would hand out to each client making a request a unique "client puzzle" - a cryptographic problem formulated using the time and information unique to the server and client request.

In order to have resources allocated for a specific connection, the client must submit to the server a correct solution to an individual puzzle deployed with conventional time-outs on server resources. During an attack, legitimate clients would experience only a small degradation in connection time, while the attacking party would require vast computational resources to sustain an interruption of service. As a result, the subsequent burden of numerous requests placed back on the attacking party would severely limit its ability to continue the attack.