Leveraging Man-in-the-middle DoS Attack with Internal TCP Retransmissions in Virtual Network

Abstract

Denial of service (DoS) attacks recently pose great threat to cloud services since it can be able to cause serious damages to others virtual machines (VM) that are on the same physical server with the victim. This opens a new strategy of DoS attack, which is the attacker attempt to be co-resident with the victim server and execute a cross-VM DoS attack inside the cloud. Among DoS attack techniques, recent studies show that TCP retransmission can be abused for reflective amplification attacks. In a virtual environment, the virtual switch system itself can retransmit TCP packets and therefore it can be abused for amplification attack by an internal attacker. In this paper, we leverage the attack by using both virtual switch’s internal TCP retransmission feature and Man-in-the-middle attack model.