Is it congestion or a DDoS attack?

We propose a new stealthy DDoS attack model referred to as the "quiet" attack. The attack traffic consists of TCP traffic only. Widely used botnets in today's various attacks and newly introduced network feedback control are integral part of the quiet attack model. We show that shortlived TCP flows can be intentionally misused. The quiet attack is detrimental to the Internet traffic and at the same time difficult to be detected by using current defense systems. We demonstrate the inability of representative defense schemes such as adaptive queue management and aggregate congestion control to detect the quiet attack.