Title: How to shutdown a cloud: a DDoS attack in a private infrastructure-as-a-service cloud

Authors: Meng Liu; Wanchun Dou; Shui Yu

Addresses: State Key Laboratory for Novel Software Technology, Nanjing University, Nanjing, 210046, China ' State Key Laboratory for Novel Software Technology, Nanjing University, Nanjing, 210046, China ' School of Information Technology, Deakin University, Burwood, VIC 3125, Australia

Abstract: Cloud computing has become a hot spot in both industry and academia due to its rapid elasticity and on demand service. However, with outsourcing the data and business applications to a third party, security and privacy issues have become a critical concern. To decrease cloud availability, which is one of the most representative security attributes, DDoS attacks can be launched. In this paper, we try to show how a hacker can launch a DDoS attack based on virtual machine (VM) co-residence to deny the service of cloud data centre in a private infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) cloud. We first introduce how to launch this attack. Then we build a Markov-chain model to simulate this attack and analyse performance of cloud data centre. Finally, we also conduct several experiments to show how VM co-residence has impact on performance of physical machines (PMs).

Keywords: DDoS attacks; cloud computing; infrastructure-as-a-service; IaaS; service availability; distributed DoS; denial of service; virtual machines; VM co-residence; Markov chain; simulation.

DOI: 10.1504/IJAACS.2017.082734

International Journal of Autonomous and Adaptive Communications Systems, 2017 Vol.10 No.1, pp.1 - 14

Received: 11 Sep 2013
Accepted: 12 Oct 2013
Published online: 10 Mar 2017 *

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