Index Page Based EDoS Attacks in Infrastructure Cloud

Abstract

One of the prominent attribute of cloud is pay-per-use, which can draw in the attackers to detriment the cloud users economically by an attack known as EDoS (Economic Denial of Sustainability) attack. This work identifies a novel class of attack in the area of EDoS attacks. Our focus is on defending the first page of any website i.e. Index Page. One of the important fact about index page attack, is that the index page of any website in this universe is available freely and even without any authentication credentials. To mitigate this attack and substantiate the difference between the legitimate and non-legitimate user, we have analyzed human behaviour of browsing and DARPA DDoS dataset. This analysis has helped us to design various models, ranging from strict to weak index page prevention models. The proposed schemes are implemented as a utility IPA-Defender (Index Page Attack Defender), which works well with minimal overhead and do not affect the legitimate users at all. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2014.