Simulation-Based Study of Distributed Denial of Service Attacks Counteract in the Cloud Services

Network availability is threatened by the traditional Denial of Service (DoS) and Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks. The risk is much increased with the emergence of the new computing paradigm of cloud computing. In this era, DDoS attacks can threaten the cloud sustainability by hitting its pricing model exploiting the cloud scalability feature. Therefore, a new phenomenon is emerged as a result of launching DDoS attacks against the cloud customers. It is called Economic Denial of Sustainability (EDoS). It is no more than an economic version of DDoS attack sharing its mechanism but different in the final aim. In order to defeat DDoS and EDoS attacks, the filtering firewalls can play main role in this regard. This paper is an extended version of a previous work that invented by the authors which introduced a new technique to mitigate the impacts of such attacks depending on the firewall features in managing a verification process to maintain the targeted system. The proposed framework is known as Enhanced DDoSMitigation System (Enhanced DDoS-MS). The firewalls characteristics are evaluated using OPNET simulation tool. The results showed that the firewall is effective in mitigating the DDoS impacts by limiting the response time, throughput, server load, and the traffic sent and received under attack. The paper also suggests using an active test bed for evaluating the proposed framework in a real manner. Key-words: cloud computing, Firewall, Distributed Denial of Service attacks, DDoS, Economic Denial of Sustainability, EDoS. WSEAS TRANSACTIONS on COMPUTER RESEARCH Wael Alosaimi, Mazin Alshamrani, Khalid Al-Begain E-ISSN: 2415-1521 19 Volume 4, 2016 The paper is organised as the following: an overview of cloud computing will be presented in the first section. After that, Denial of Service attack will be defined, Distributed Denial of Service attacks will be classified into two main types, and the Economic Denial of sustainability concept will be explained. The proposed framework will be described after that and its evaluation will be presented in terms of the simulation setup and the achieved results.