Security in Computing 5th Edition by Shari Lawrence Pfleeger, Charles P Pfleeger, Jonathan Margulies

Exercise 15

Describe an example in which absolute denial of service to a user (that is, the user gets no response from the computer) is a serious problem to that user. Describe another example where 10 percent denial of service to a user (that is, the user’s computation progresses, but at a rate 10 percent slower than normal) is a serious problem to that user. Could access by unauthorized people to a computing system result in a 10 percent denial of service to the legitimate users? How?

Step 1 of 2

Absolute denial of service

An absolute denial of service to a user is where the user does not get any response from the computer. This includes a serious problem when the user faces the problem of network failure.

For example, a student has to submit some important documents and attachments such as the term papers on the last day through email and while attaching the mail the student gets an error message of denial of service over the network due to some network errors, thus this could be a serious problem to the student.

Another example where the user faces 10 percent denial of service includes a scenario I in which a student tries to attach an email but due to slow network problem, the mail could not get attached and the computation progress ends within the median of the mail attachment. Thus, this causes a serious problem to the student.