Detecting DDoS Attacks in Cloud Computing Environment

Abstract

This paper is focused on detecting and analyzing the Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks in cloud computing environments. This type of attacks is often the source of cloud services disruptions. Our solution is to combine the evidences obtained from Intrusion Detection Systems (IDSs) deployed in the virtual machines (VMs) of the cloud systems with a data fusion methodology in the front-end. Specifically, when the attacks appear, the VM-based IDS will yield alerts, which will be stored into the Mysql database placed within the Cloud Fusion Unit (CFU) of the front-end server. We propose a quantitative solution for analyzing alerts generated by the IDSs, using the Dempster-Shafer theory (DST) operations in 3-valued logic and the fault-tree analysis (FTA) for the mentioned flooding attacks. At the last step, our solution uses the Dempsters combination rule to fuse evidence from multiple independent sources.