Bankrupting DoS Attackers

Can we make a denial-of-service attacker pay more than the server and honest clients? Consider a model where a server sees a stream of jobs sent by either honest clients or an adversary. The server sets a price for servicing each job with the aid of an estimator, which provides approximate statistical information about the distribution of previously occurring good jobs.We describe and analyze pricing algorithms for the server under different models of synchrony, with total cost parameterized by the accuracy of the estimator. Given a reasonably accurate estimator, the algorithm's cost provably grows more slowly than the attacker's cost, as the attacker's cost grows large. Additionally, we prove a lower bound, showing that our pricing algorithm yields asymptotically tight results when the estimator is accurate within constant factors.

@article{chakraborty2025_2205.08287,
  title={ Bankrupting DoS Attackers },
  author={ Trisha Chakraborty and Abir Islam and Valerie King and Daniel Rayborn and Jared Saia and Maxwell Young },
  journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2205.08287},
  year={ 2025 }
}