Which category of DoS attacks targets infrastructure resources like connection state tables in devices such as load balancers and firewalls?

• A. Application Layer Attacks
• B. UDP flood attack
• C. Protocol Attacks
• D. ICMP flood attacks

Answer: (C)

Protocol attacks focus on the way network protocols operate and how devices track ongoing connections. They aim to exhaust the stateful resources of infrastructure like load balancers and firewalls by forcing the device to maintain a large number of connection states or handle abnormal protocol behavior. When these state-tracking resources are overwhelmed, legitimate traffic can’t be processed, and services become unavailable even if there isn’t enough bandwidth to saturate the network.

This is different from application-layer attacks, which target the logic of services themselves (for example, overloading a web server with complex or many HTTP requests). It’s also different from pure floods of UDP or ICMP, which mainly try to consume bandwidth and network capacity rather than specifically exhausting a device’s protocol state tables.