The Impact of DDoS Attacks on Application Containers, System Containers, and Virtual Machines

Abstract

A Distributed Denial of Service attack consists of many individual computer systems simultaneously overwhelming a single computing resource with information, thereby hindering its ability to function. Comparing the abilities of a Distributed Process Execution Environment’s ability to withstand a DDoS attack will demonstrate the advantages of each. This is necessary when designing a cloud system, as the chances of that system being compromised is vital to its operation. The experiment was performed by having several compute nodes as Attackers that worked together to perform a DDoS attack on the single machine, the Defender, running the Distributed Process Execution Environments. As the Defender was undergoing the DDoS attack, its performance was measured over time in the areas of CPU, GPU, Networking Bandwidth, and Memory.