Moving target defense strategy for mitigating denial of service attack in the public cloud environment

Abstract

Internet is a network of interconnected systems which works collaboratively and services the users without any disruption. But for achieving the same in real time, needs the new prominent technology cloud computing. The massive attractive features and simple pay-as-you-go model of cloud makes it reachable to all the users Denial-of-Service (DoS) plays a crucial role in making the services inaccessible to its intended users. The traditional DoS can no longer be successful in the cloud scenario as it poses the auto scaling feature. Still, the DoS can consume the bandwidth of the cloud customers as they need to pay for their complete usage. In spite of the huge number of recovery measures available in cloud, DoS becoming harder every day in terms of attack volume and severity. Hence complete mitigation against DoS attack is the expected solution which needs to be proved in today’s digital world. Moving Target Defence (MTD) is one such prominent emerging solution which aims to avoid the DDoS attacks in the cloud environment. The challenge of MTD is to change the attack surface periodically such that the attackers will be facing difficulty in even the attack attempts. This paper aims to provide solution for avoiding DoS attack by adopting MTD algorithm for making the web servers redundant in the cloud environment. Experimental simulations prove the effectiveness of MTD in the public cloud environment.