Can Multipath TCP be Robust to Cyber Attacks With Incomplete Information?

Abstract

Promoted by the advancements in the various wireless access technologies, modern mobile devices equipped with multiple network interfaces are rapidly becoming the norm, and this provides a driving force for the large-scale deployment of the Multipath Transmission Control Protocol (MPTCP) in the current and future Internet. However, the simultaneous use of multiple network paths for concurrent multipath data transmission can make MPTCP have a larger attack surface than the traditional single-path transport protocols, and this may be likely to pose a risk of MPTCP being much more susceptible to cyber attacks. In this paper, we present a measurement method to investigate the vulnerability and robustness of MPTCP under cyber attacks with incomplete network information, by considering the fact that most cyber attacks normally lack of real-time information with respect to various MPTCP attributes. We mathematically characterize cyber attacks with incomplete network information from the viewpoints of both the cyber attacker and the MPTCP communication system, and then we introduce a mixed attack strategy, by jointly considering the features of both the random attacks and the selective attacks, to evaluate the robustness of MPTCP.