Title: On the security of reliable server pooling systems

Authors: Thomas Dreibholz, Xing Zhou, Martin Becke, Jobin Pulinthanath, Erwin P. Rathgeb, Wencai Du

Addresses: Institute for Experimental Mathematics, University of Duisburg-Essen, Ellernstrasse 29, 45326 Essen, Germany. ' College of Information Science and Technology, Hainan University, Renmin Avenue 58, 570228 Haikou, Hainan, China. ' Institute for Experimental Mathematics, University of Duisburg-Essen, Ellernstrasse 29, 45326 Essen, Germany. ' Institute for Experimental Mathematics, University of Duisburg-Essen, Ellernstrasse 29, 45326 Essen, Germany. ' Institute for Experimental Mathematics, University of Duisburg-Essen, Ellernstrasse 29, 45326 Essen, Germany. ' College of Information Science and Technology, Hainan University, Renmin Avenue 58, 570228 Haikou, Hainan, China

Abstract: In order to cope with the requirements of availability-critical internet services, reliable server pooling (RSerPool) has been developed as the new IETF standard for a lightweight server redundancy and session failover framework. While the service and pool management performance of RSerPool had already been the topic of various research papers, its security has not yet been widely examined. But security for availability-critical systems is crucial, since service outages – regardless of whether being caused by system failures or intentional denial of service (DoS) attacks – are not acceptable for the users of such systems. In this article, we first introduce RSerPool as well as the underlying SCTP protocol. In an analysis of the attack threats, we will show the possibilities of an attacker to degrade the service provided by an RSerPool system. We will furthermore introduce possible countermeasures, in order to prevent attacks and improve the robustness of the systems. We will finally show the effectiveness of our proposed countermeasures using simulations. In order to validate our simulation results, we furthermore compare them to measurements from a real-world internet setup using the PlanetLab.

Keywords: reliable server pooling; RSerPool security; service outages; system failures; denial of service; DoS attacks; robustness; performance analysis; PlanetLab; availability-critical internet services; server redundancy; session failover; reliability; critical infrastructures; web services; attack countermeasures; simulation.

DOI: 10.1504/IJIIDS.2010.036894

International Journal of Intelligent Information and Database Systems, 2010 Vol.4 No.6, pp.552 - 578

Received: 31 Oct 2009
Accepted: 25 May 2010

Published online: 15 Nov 2010 *

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