Leveraging Good Intentions to Reduce Malicious Network Traffic

We present a solution to reduce unwanted network traffic by enabling either side of a conversation to summarily terminate the conversation without the other endpoint’s cooperation. Our work is motivated by the observation that many compromised endhosts on the network are well-intentioned but easily compromised; these machines are often compromised and their resources used to attack others. We argue that the good intentions of these endhosts can be leveraged to construct a control plane that ensures that, even when compromised, these wellintentioned machines only generate well-behaved traffic. This independently enforced control plane prevents an endhost from blatantly disregarding requests to cease traffic generation. The solution’s viability rests upon its unobtrusive deployment. No extra mechanism is needed within the network as all enforcement is performed at the endhosts. Hosts are not restricted in their behavior except by the behavior demanded by their peers.