The Slow HTTP Distributed Denial of Service Attack Detection in Cloud

Abstract

Cloud computing became popular due to nature as it provides the flexibility to add or remove the resources on-demand basis. This also reduces the cost of investments for the enterprises significantly. The adoption of cloud computing is very high for enterprises running their online applications. The availability of online services is critical for businesses like financial services, e-commerce applications, etc. Though cloud provides availability, still these applications are having potential threats of going down due to the slow HTTP Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack in the cloud. The slow HTTP attacks intention is to consume all the available server resources and make it unavailable to the real users. The slow HTTP DDoS attack comes with different formats such as slow HTTP headers attacks, slow HTTP body attacks and slow HTTP read attacks. Detecting the slow HTTP DDoS attacks in the cloud is very crucial to safeguard online cloud applications. This is a very interesting and challenging topic in DDoS as it mimics the slow network. This paper proposed a novel method to detect slow HTTP DDoS attacks in the cloud. The solution is implemented using the OpenStack cloud platform. The experiments conducted exhibits the accurate results on detecting the attacks at the early stages. The slowHTTPTest open source tool is used in this experiment to originate slow HTTP DDoS attacks.