An Experimental Evaluation of the EDoS-Shield Mitigation Technique for Securing the Cloud

Abstract

Security of cloud services is of utmost importance for contemporary cloud providers. In addition to the traditional malicious attacks that have targeted cloud datacenters in the past, new and persistent threats have changed the landscape of cyber-attacks in recent times. Economic Denial of Sustainability (EDoS) attacks are one of such variant attack types with serious implications and consequences. Such attacks exploit the scalability and elasticity characteristics of the cloud to enforce unwanted resource allocation with the aim of causing economic losses to the cloud service owner. In this paper, we present an experimental study to evaluate the effectiveness of the popular EDoS-Shield technique which is designed to mitigate EDoS attacks. The effectiveness of EDoS-Shield is studied in terms of the needed VM compute resources, response time, and CPU utilization.