A Comprehensive Characterization of Threats Targeting Low-Latency Services: the Case of L4S

Abstract

New types of services with low-latency requirements have become a major challenge for the future Internet. Many optimizations, all targeting the latency reduction have been proposed, and among them, jointly re-architecting congestion control and active queue management has been particularly considered. In this effort, the L4S (Low Latency, Low Loss and Scalable Throughput) proposal aims at allowing both classic and low-latency traffic to cohabit within a single node architecture. Although this architecture sounds promising for latency improvement, it can be exploited by an attacker to perform malicious actions whose purposes are to defeat its low-latency feature and consequently make their supported applications unusable. In this paper, we analyze the set of weaknesses of the L4S proposal and we show that application-layer protocols such as QUIC can easily be hacked in order to exploit the over-sensitivity of those new services to network variations. By implementing such undesirable flows in a real testbed and characterizing how they impact the proper delivery of low-latency flows, we demonstrate their reality and give insights for research directions on the detection of flows threatening low latency services.