Improvements on the WTLS protocol to avoid denial of service attacks
The current WTLS protocol is closely modeled after the well-studied SSL protocol. However, since some differences exist between these two protocols, even if the SSL protocol is secure, the WTLS protocol may not. We propose three kinds of possible Denial of Service (DoS) attacks on the existing WTLS protocol, which can be categorized into two types: memory exhaustion attacks and CPU exhaustion attacks. The first and the second kinds of attacks belong to memory exhaustion attacks, and the third kind of attack is a CPU exhaustion attack. Not only wireless network clients but also Internet clients can launch these three kinds of attacks, which are very simple and effective. Since Internet clients are more powerful in network bandwidth and CPU resources, damages made by these attackers are more serious, which can even make the WTLS server stop providing services for legitimate clients. Client cookies, client puzzles and an application timer is used to improve the current protocol, and our improvements are secure against such attacks.
wtls client cookies client puzzles wap dos attacks