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Cloud adoption by industry and governments has been on the rise for the past few years due to the obvious cloud technology advantages that include scalability, reliability, availability, agility, and cost efficiency. However, cloud security remains a main barrier for such adoption. Distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks pose a serious security threat to cloud-hosted services and applications. In recent years, in addition to DDoS attacks, cloud systems are prone to be attacked by a new type of attacks known as economic denial of sustainability (EDoS). An EDoS attack targets the economic resources of the cloud adopter who gets billed and charged on a 'pay-as-you-use' basis. In an EDoS attack, the attacker goal is to make the cloud system unaffordable and no longer economically acceptable for the cloud adopter. An EDoS-Shield is known to be an effective technique to mitigate such attacks, in which malicious requests are detected and dropped prior to reaching the cloud service nodes. In this paper, we model and study the performance of EDoS-Shield using queuing theory modeling. Various scenarios applicable to EDoS-shielding are considered and analyzed. We analyzed and compared the performance of proposed system in terms of key performance metrics which include response time, CPU utilization of allocated cloud compute resources, and system throughput. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cloud computing is currently one of the fastest growing segments of IT. To date, and according to a recent survey conducted by the International Data Corporation, security is the biggest challenge to cloud computing. A cloud introduces resource-rich computing platforms, where adopters are charged based on the usage of the cloud's resources, known as 'pay-as-you-use' or utility computing. However, a conventional Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attack on server and network resources compromises cloud computing services by charging cloud adopters more cost due to the attack activities that consume cloud's resources. In such case, the main goal of such attack is to make the cloud computing unsustainable by targeting the cloud adopter's economic resources. Thus, it constitutes a new breed of DDoS attacks, namely Economic Denial of Sustainability (EDoS) attack. In this paper, we study the impact of EDoS attacks on the cloud computing services, considering only a single class of service. We developed an analytical model verified by a simulation model to study such impact of EDoS attacks on the cloud computing. The analytical model relies on the queuing model that captures the cloud services and considers a number of performance and cost metrics including end-to-end response time, utilization of computing resources, throughput, and the incurred cost resulting from the attack. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]