Effectiveness of Application Layer Denial of Service Counter- Measures in Cloud Computing

Abstract

Cloud computing, which appears to be a new computing trend, has a history that can be traced to the 1960s, yet the potential of computing paradigm has not been fully utilised. This is because of security and trust management issues associated with the paradigm. With a rise in financial losses reaching as high as $4.5 billion in 2017 and a breach of about 4.5million records in the cyberspace, cyber security remains an important aspect of any IT infrastructure demanding thorough evaluation. This is because the consequences of failing to do so are always dire as evident in the statistical figures. Studies so far have shown remarkable efforts in the area of cloud computing security but has paid little attention to the area of application based denial of service and its distributed variant.

The aim of this study is to review the adequacy of existing counter-measures against Extensive Mark-up Language Denial of Service (XDoS) and its distributed version (Extensive Mark-up Language Distributed Denial of Service (XDDoS)) which are application based denial of service in software as a service (SaaS) cloud computing service model.

A review of literature in the area of counter-measures against DoS, DDoS, application based DoS and DDoS was conducted and it was found that current counter-measure are still inadequate. Hence, further study must be conducted to find an effective counter-measure against the XDoS and the XDDoS. As well as finding other aspects of computing resource that an attacker can use to cause denial of service so as to mitigate them.