After finishing my first research project as an assistant on TCP Initial Sequence Number Guessing, I started my first own project in the System Security Research Group of Christian Rossow.

We investigate characteristics of the TCP congestion control algorithm that can be exploited to trick a server into injecting significantly more data into a network than the network can effectively handle, ultimately resulting in a Denial of Service. By manipulating TCP’s congestion control mechanism we can cause the server to overestimate the available bandwidth and continue transmitting at a constant rate. This behavior is meant to flood downstream links or exhaust local networks without relying on traditional volumetric attack patterns.

We aim to publish this project as a paper as well as my master’s thesis.