An OpenStack based cloud testbed framework for evaluating HTTP flooding attacks

Abstract

The cloud computing has inherent challenges to detect the Hyper Text Transfer Protocol (HTTP) flooding Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack due to its natural characteristics like virtualization, elasticity and multi-tenancy. The usage of cloud computing is user-friendly, but the implementation of the cloud infrastructure such as compute node, networking, cloud storage is very complex in order to achieve its various characteristics. Similarly, detecting the HTTP flooding attack in the cloud is also very complex as it requires an understanding of various potential attack paths in such a complex environment. So, designing the cloud testbed framework to detect the HTTP flooding attacks is a challenging problem to be solved. The cloud testbed framework has to consider several aspects of attack scenarios while accounting the cloud characteristics. This paper reviews the existing DDoS attack detection framework and their gaps and proposes a cloud testbed framework for evaluating the HTTP flooding DDoS attack solution. The proposed framework is implemented using the OpenStack cloud environment. The Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA) World Cup 1998 real-time dataset is used to generate the HTTP flooding attack to the OpenStack cloud testbed framework for the experimentation.