A Proactive Approach to Intrusion Detection in Cloud Software as a Service

Abstract

Cloud computing environment is very much malicious intrusion prone hence cloud security is very vital. Existing network security mechanisms face new challenges in the cloud such as DDOS attacks, virtual machine intrusion attacks and malicious user activities. This chapter includes brief introduction about cloud computing, concept of virtualization, cloud security, various DDOS attacks, tools to run these attacks & various techniques to detect these attacks, review of threshold methods used for detection of DDOS attacks & abnormal network behavior and proposed dynamic threshold based algorithmic approach. Although various cloud security measures are prevailing to avoid virtual machine attacks and malicious user activities but these are not foolproof. Hence, new security methods are required to increase users' level of trust in clouds. By scrubbing traffic at major Internet points and backbone connection, a defense line is created for mitigation of DDOS attacks. Dynamic threshold algorithm based approach is proposed as a proactive approach to detect DDOS attacks for achieving secure cloud environment.