Spam, phishing, and denial of service attacks are among the various schemes that can diminish the value of the Internet. Many solutions have been proposed to try to maintain the integrity and trustworthiness of the Internet. This monograph proposes several protocols to combat denial of service attacks. “Hop integrity” means that whenever a computer receives a message from one of its neighbors, it can be sure that the message is new (the message is not a repeat from some malicious computer) and authenticated (the original content is not modified in the process). The book is written like a scientific paper. Therefore, unless you are a researcher in this field, you will find the book uninteresting.
The book contains ten chapters. The first four are introductory in nature and explain what a denial of service attack is, propose an abstract protocol notation for later use, and outline the essence of a secure protocol. The next four chapters discuss four protocols for hop integrity. Finally, the last two chapters deal with the implementation issues related to hop integrity and its applications to mobile Internet, multicasting, and routing protocols.
Since this book is about protocols that make communication secure and reliable, the correctness of protocols is very important. Abstract protocol notations and state transition diagrams are used to represent protocols and to prove their correctness. However, since in general the complexity of proving protocol correctness is undecidable, the authors should have first briefly explained the general nature of designing and verifying communication network protocols.
Many good ideas have been proposed to restrict the opportunities for sabotage available on the Internet. Most of these ideas are not implemented, though, because they need the cooperation of all of the routers in the network. As these hop integrity protocols show, if one of the routers in the network does not implement the protocols, the whole scheme fails. To have a permanent impact, this book still has a long way to go.
