Securing Cloud Servers Against Flooding Based DDOS Attacks

Cloud computing is still a juvenile and most dynamic field characterized by a buzzing IT industry. Virtually every industry and even some parts of the public sector are taking on cloud computing today, either as a provider or as a consumer. It has now become essentially an inseparable part of everyone's life. The cloud thus has become a part of the critical global infrastructure but is unique in that it has no customary borders to safeguard it from attacks. Once weakened these web servers can serve as a launching point for conducting further attacks against users in the cloud. One such attack is the DoS or its version DDOS attack. Distributed Denial of Service (DdoS) Attacks have recently emerged as one of the most newsworthy, if not the greatest weaknesses of the Internet. DDoS attacks cause economic losses due to the unavailability of services and potentially serious security problems due to incapacitation of critical infrastructures. This paper presents a simple distance estimation based technique to detect and prevent the cloud from flooding based DDoS attack and thereby protect other servers and users from its adverse effects.