Abstract

Abstract. Denial of service by server resource exhaustion has become a major security threat in open communications networks. Public-key authentication does not completely protect against the attacks because the authentication protocols often leave ways for an unauthenticated client to consume a server’s memory space and computational resources by initiating a large number of protocol runs and inducing the server to perform expensive cryptographic computations. We show how stateless authentication protocols and the client puzzles of Juels and Brainard can be used to prevent such attacks. 1

Citations