Bankrupting DoS Attackers

ORCID

Young: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5251-8595

MSU Affiliation

James Worth Bagley College of Engineering; Department of Computer Science and Engineering

Creation Date

2026-07-30

Abstract

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 reasonable accurate estimator, the attacker’s cost grows asymptotically faster than our algorithm’s cost. Additionally, we prove a lower bound, showing that our pricing algorithm yields asymptotically tight results when the estimator is accurate within constant factors.

Publication Date

6-8-2026

Publication Title

Theoretical Computer Science

Publisher

Elsevier

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Rights

© 2026 The Author(s)

This document is currently not available here.

Share

COinS
 

Digital Object Identifier (DOI)

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tcs.2026.116082