Launching Low-Rate DoS Attacks with Cache-Enabled WiFi Offloading

With the ever-increasing coverage of WiFi access points, WiFi offloading makes a great contribution on mitigate the gap between cellular network capacity and mobile data traffic. The cache-enabled WiFi offloading, in particular, can reduces the waiting time of mobile users by making more use of the bandwidth of WiFi links. However, it may also bring about new types of security threats. In this paper, we present a method to launch low-rate DoS attacks using the offloading architecture. We analyze the transmission process of the cache-enabled WiFi offloading and propose to insert attack traffic during the normal data transmission. The simulation results illustrate that our method can effectively produce low-rate DoS attacks, which demonstrates the feasibility of this new type of attacks and also puts forward a warning to guard against it.