An Adaptive Multi-agent Solution to Detect DoS Attack in SOAP Messages

Abstract

A SOAP message can be affected by a DoS attack if the incoming message has been either created or modified maliciously. The specifications of existing security standards do not focus on this type of attack. This article presents a novel distributed and adaptive approach for dealing with DoS attacks in Web Service environments, which represents an alternative to the existing centralized solutions. The solution proposes a distributed hierarchical multi-agent architecture that implements a classification mechanism in two phases. The main benefits of the approach are the distributed capabilities of the multi-agent systems and the self-adaption ability to the changes that occur in the patterns of attack. A prototype of the architecture was developed and the results obtained are presented in this study.