Fairness Attacks in the Explicit Control Protocol
Christo Wilson
Chris Coakley
Ben Y. Zhao
Proceedings of Fifteenth IEEE International Workshop on Quality of Service (IWQoS)
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Paper Abstract
Protocols such as the Explicit Control Protocol (XCP) use explicit
router feedback to guide endpoint transmission rates for
near-optimal capacity utilization and fairness. However,
non-cooperative end hosts can manipulate and ignore feedback to
either obtain unfair advantages over cooperative hosts, or perform
denial-of-service attacks on intervening network links. In this
paper we explore the methodology behind, and construct working
examples of different attack vectors on XCP, including both cheating
senders and receivers. Through detailed simulations in ns, we show
that misbehaving users can dominate bandwidth allocation on shared
links, and our strategies allow them to successfully allocate
bandwidth by either sharing or selfishly competing for the
bottleneck bandwidth capacity.