• KSII Transactions on Internet and Information Systems (TIIS)
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• v.11 no.4
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• pp.2149-2170
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• 2017

Application-layer Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attack is one of the leading security problems in the Internet. In recent years, the attack strategies of application-layer DDoS have rapidly developed. This paper introduces a new attack strategy named Path Vulnerabilities-Based (PVB) attack. In this attack strategy, an attacker first analyzes the contents of web pages and subsequently measures the actual response time of each webpage to build a web-resource-weighted-directed graph. The attacker uses a Top M Longest Path algorithm to find M DDoS vulnerable paths that consume considerable resources when sequentially accessing the pages following any of those paths. A detection mechanism for such attack is also proposed and discussed. A finite-state machine is used to model the dynamical processes for the state of the user's session and monitor the PVB attacks. Numerical results based on real-traffic simulations reveal the efficiency of the attack strategy and the detection mechanism.