Evaluation of an impact of the dos attacks on the selected virtualization platforms

Abstract

The work includes research results characterizing the impact of distributed denial of service attacks (DDoS) on the resources of host operating systems and virtual machines performance. Analysis of existing types of virtualization has been made. It was necessary to discuss the architectures of virtualization systems such as Xen Project, VMware ESXi, KVM and Oracle Virtualbox in order to outline differences in their structure, which will result in often very different results in the performance test. It was also necessary to present the concept of denial of service attack, its history and evolution over the years from simple DoS attacks in layer 3 and 4 of the OSI model by distributed DoS (DDoS) attacks most often implemented in layer 7 to their currently used forms which are multiplied DDoS attacks with reflection exploiting the weaknesses of the DNS protocol. The most attention was paid to the study of the impact of various types of DDoS attacks on the real performance of the virtualized system that based on Intel VT-x technology. To ensure the comprehensiveness of research results, the attacks were carried out in three layers, dividing each of them into several stages characterized by different intensity of network traffic.