Goto

Collaborating Authors

 dos attack


Prompt, Divide, and Conquer: Bypassing Large Language Model Safety Filters via Segmented and Distributed Prompt Processing

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Large Language Models (LLMs) have transformed task automation and content generation across various domains while incorporating safety filters to prevent misuse. We introduce a novel jailbreaking framework that employs distributed prompt processing combined with iterative refinements to bypass these safety measures, particularly in generating malicious code. Our architecture consists of four key modules: prompt segmentation, parallel processing, response aggregation, and LLM-based jury evaluation. Tested on 500 malicious prompts across 10 cybersecurity categories, the framework achieves a 73.2% Success Rate (SR) in generating malicious code. Notably, our comparative analysis reveals that traditional single-LLM judge evaluation overestimates SRs (93.8%) compared to our LLM jury system (73.2%), with manual verification confirming that single-judge assessments often accept incomplete implementations. Moreover, we demonstrate that our distributed architecture improves SRs by 12% over the non-distributed approach in an ablation study, highlighting both the effectiveness of distributed prompt processing and the importance of robust evaluation methodologies in assessing jailbreak attempts.


Detecting and Mitigating DDoS Attacks with AI: A Survey

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Distributed Denial of Service attacks represent an active cybersecurity research problem. Recent research shifted from static rule-based defenses towards AI-based detection and mitigation. This comprehensive survey covers several key topics. Preeminently, state-of-the-art AI detection methods are discussed. An in-depth taxonomy based on manual expert hierarchies and an AI-generated dendrogram are provided, thus settling DDoS categorization ambiguities. An important discussion on available datasets follows, covering data format options and their role in training AI detection methods together with adversarial training and examples augmentation. Beyond detection, AI based mitigation techniques are surveyed as well. Finally, multiple open research directions are proposed.


Anomaly-Flow: A Multi-domain Federated Generative Adversarial Network for Distributed Denial-of-Service Detection

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks remain a critical threat to Internet services, causing costly disruptions. While machine learning (ML) has shown promise in DDoS detection, current solutions struggle with multi-domain environments where attacks must be detected across heterogeneous networks and organizational boundaries. This limitation severely impacts the practical deployment of ML-based defenses in real-world settings. This paper introduces Anomaly-Flow, a novel framework that addresses this critical gap by combining Federated Learning (FL) with Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) for privacy-preserving, multi-domain DDoS detection. Our proposal enables collaborative learning across diverse network domains while preserving data privacy through synthetic flow generation. Through extensive evaluation across three distinct network datasets, Anomaly-Flow achieves an average F1-score of $0.747$, outperforming baseline models. Importantly, our framework enables organizations to share attack detection capabilities without exposing sensitive network data, making it particularly valuable for critical infrastructure and privacy-sensitive sectors. Beyond immediate technical contributions, this work provides insights into the challenges and opportunities in multi-domain DDoS detection, establishing a foundation for future research in collaborative network defense systems. Our findings have important implications for academic research and industry practitioners working to deploy practical ML-based security solutions.


Trust Under Siege: Label Spoofing Attacks against Machine Learning for Android Malware Detection

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Machine learning (ML) malware detectors rely heavily on crowd-sourced AntiVirus (AV) labels, with platforms like VirusTotal serving as a trusted source of malware annotations. But what if attackers could manipulate these labels to classify benign software as malicious? We introduce label spoofing attacks, a new threat that contaminates crowd-sourced datasets by embedding minimal and undetectable malicious patterns into benign samples. These patterns coerce AV engines into misclassifying legitimate files as harmful, enabling poisoning attacks against ML-based malware classifiers trained on those data. We demonstrate this scenario by developing AndroVenom, a methodology for polluting realistic data sources, causing consequent poisoning attacks against ML malware detectors. Experiments show that not only state-of-the-art feature extractors are unable to filter such injection, but also various ML models experience Denial of Service already with 1% poisoned samples. Additionally, attackers can flip decisions of specific unaltered benign samples by modifying only 0.015% of the training data, threatening their reputation and market share and being unable to be stopped by anomaly detectors on training data. We conclude our manuscript by raising the alarm on the trustworthiness of the training process based on AV annotations, requiring further investigation on how to produce proper labels for ML malware detectors.


Detecting Distributed Denial of Service Attacks Using Logistic Regression and SVM Methods

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

A distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack is an attempt to produce humongous traffic within a network by overwhelming a targeted server or its neighboring infrastructure with a flood of service requests ceaselessly coming from multiple remotely controlled malware-infected computers or network-connected devices. Thus, exploring DDoS attacks by recognizing their functionalities and differentiating them from normal traffic services are the primary concerns of network security issues particularly for online businesses. In modern networks, most DDoS attacks occur in the network and application layer including HTTP flood, UDP flood, SIDDOS, SMURF, SNMP flood, IP NULL, etc. The goal of this paper is to detect DDoS attacks from all service requests and classify them according to DDoS classes. In this regard, a standard dataset is collected from the internet which contains several network-related attributes and their corresponding DDoS attack class name. Two(2) different machine learning approaches, SVM and Logistic Regression, are implemented in the dataset for detecting and classifying DDoS attacks, and a comparative study is accomplished among them in terms of accuracy, precision, and recall rates. Logistic Regression and SVM both achieve 98.65% classification accuracy which is the highest achieved accuracy among other previous experiments with the same dataset.


Wireless Resource Allocation with Collaborative Distributed and Centralized DRL under Control Channel Attacks

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

In this paper, we consider a wireless resource allocation problem in a cyber-physical system (CPS) where the control channel, carrying resource allocation commands, is subjected to denial-of-service (DoS) attacks. We propose a novel concept of collaborative distributed and centralized (CDC) resource allocation to effectively mitigate the impact of these attacks. To optimize the CDC resource allocation policy, we develop a new CDC-deep reinforcement learning (DRL) algorithm, whereas existing DRL frameworks only formulate either centralized or distributed decision-making problems. Simulation results demonstrate that the CDC-DRL algorithm significantly outperforms state-of-the-art DRL benchmarks, showcasing its ability to address resource allocation problems in large-scale CPSs under control channel attacks.


A Comparative Analysis of Machine Learning Models for DDoS Detection in IoT Networks

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

This paper presents the detection of DDoS attacks in IoT networks using machine learning models. Their rapid growth has made them highly susceptible to various forms of cyberattacks, many of whose security procedures are implemented in an irregular manner. It evaluates the efficacy of different machine learning models, such as XGBoost, K-Nearest Neighbours, Stochastic Gradient Descent, and Na\"ive Bayes, in detecting DDoS attacks from normal network traffic. Each model has been explained on several performance metrics, such as accuracy, precision, recall, and F1-score to understand the suitability of each model in real-time detection and response against DDoS threats. This comparative analysis will, therefore, enumerate the unique strengths and weaknesses of each model with respect to the IoT environments that are dynamic and hence moving in nature. The effectiveness of these models is analyzed, showing how machine learning can greatly enhance IoT security frameworks, offering adaptive, efficient, and reliable DDoS detection capabilities. These findings have shown the potential of machine learning in addressing the pressing need for robust IoT security solutions that can mitigate modern cyber threats and assure network integrity.


Exploring Feature Importance and Explainability Towards Enhanced ML-Based DoS Detection in AI Systems

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Denial of Service (DoS) attacks pose a significant threat in the realm of AI systems security, causing substantial financial losses and downtime. However, AI systems' high computational demands, dynamic behavior, and data variability make monitoring and detecting DoS attacks challenging. Nowadays, statistical and machine learning (ML)-based DoS classification and detection approaches utilize a broad range of feature selection mechanisms to select a feature subset from networking traffic datasets. Feature selection is critical in enhancing the overall model performance and attack detection accuracy while reducing the training time. In this paper, we investigate the importance of feature selection in improving ML-based detection of DoS attacks. Specifically, we explore feature contribution to the overall components in DoS traffic datasets by utilizing statistical analysis and feature engineering approaches. Our experimental findings demonstrate the usefulness of the thorough statistical analysis of DoS traffic and feature engineering in understanding the behavior of the attack and identifying the best feature selection for ML-based DoS classification and detection.


Safeguard is a Double-edged Sword: Denial-of-service Attack on Large Language Models

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Safety is a paramount concern of large language models (LLMs) in their open deployment. To this end, safeguard methods aim to enforce the ethical and responsible use of LLMs through safety alignment or guardrail mechanisms. However, we found that the malicious attackers could exploit false positives of safeguards, i.e., fooling the safeguard model to block safe content mistakenly, leading to a new denial-of-service (DoS) attack on LLMs. Specifically, by software or phishing attacks on user client software, attackers insert a short, seemingly innocuous adversarial prompt into to user prompt templates in configuration files; thus, this prompt appears in final user requests without visibility in the user interface and is not trivial to identify. By designing an optimization process that utilizes gradient and attention information, our attack can automatically generate seemingly safe adversarial prompts, approximately only 30 characters long, that universally block over 97\% of user requests on Llama Guard 3. The attack presents a new dimension of evaluating LLM safeguards focusing on false positives, fundamentally different from the classic jailbreak.


Denial-of-Service Poisoning Attacks against Large Language Models

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Recent studies have shown that LLMs are vulnerable to denial-of-service (DoS) attacks, where adversarial inputs like spelling errors or non-semantic prompts trigger endless outputs without generating an [EOS] token. These attacks can potentially cause high latency and make LLM services inaccessible to other users or tasks. However, when there are speech-to-text interfaces (e.g., voice commands to a robot), executing such DoS attacks becomes challenging, as it is difficult to introduce spelling errors or non-semantic prompts through speech. A simple DoS attack in these scenarios would be to instruct the model to "Keep repeating Hello", but we observe that relying solely on natural instructions limits output length, which is bounded by the maximum length of the LLM's supervised finetuning (SFT) data. To overcome this limitation, we propose poisoning-based DoS (P-DoS) attacks for LLMs, demonstrating that injecting a single poisoned sample designed for DoS purposes can break the output length limit. For example, a poisoned sample can successfully attack GPT-4o and GPT-4o mini (via OpenAI's finetuning API) using less than $1, causing repeated outputs up to the maximum inference length (16K tokens, compared to 0.5K before poisoning). Additionally, we perform comprehensive ablation studies on open-source LLMs and extend our method to LLM agents, where attackers can control both the finetuning dataset and algorithm. Our findings underscore the urgent need for defenses against P-DoS attacks to secure LLMs. Our code is available at https://github.com/sail-sg/P-DoS.