SECAI Core · phase 11 of 15
Denial of service attack
Any type of physical, application, or network attack that affects the availability of a managed resource.
The Explain card
- Plain English
- A denial of service attack is any physical, application, or network action that degrades or removes the availability of a managed resource.
- Example
- An attacker sends a steady stream of enormous prompts to an LLM API endpoint. Each request hogs GPU time and memory, so genuine users see timeouts even though the server is technically up.
- Why it matters
- AI inference is expensive per request, which makes it an easy target. Rate limits, token caps, and request queuing are availability controls, not just cost controls.
- Hook
- Make it so busy with nonsense that it cannot do its job.
Where it sits in the deck
Phase 11: Threat Landscape: Attack Vectors and Adversarial Techniques
With defences named, learn what they must defend against — the full catalogue of attack techniques targeting AI systems, their inputs, outputs, training pipelines, and supply chains.
