Can we beat DDoS attacks in clouds?

Cloud is becoming a dominant computing platform. Naturally, a question that arises is whether we can beat notorious DDoS attacks in a cloud environment. Researchers have demonstrated that the essential issue of DDoS attack and defense is resource competition between defenders and attackers. A cloud usually possesses profound resources and has full control and dynamic allocation capability of its resources. Therefore, cloud offers us the potential to overcome DDoS attacks. However, individual cloud hosted servers are still vulnerable to DDoS attacks if they still run in the traditional way. In this paper, we propose a dynamic resource allocation strategy to counter DDoS attacks against individual cloud customers. When a DDoS attack occurs, we employ the idle resources of the cloud to clone sufficient intrusion prevention servers for the victim in order to quickly filter out attack packets and guarantee the quality of the service for benign users simultaneously. We establish a mathematical model to approximate the needs of our resource investment based on queueing theory. Through careful system analysis and real-world data set experiments, we conclude that we can defeat DDoS attacks in a cloud environment. © 2013 IEEE.

Performance analysis of software-defined network switch using M/Geo/1 model

The aim of this letter is to propose an analytical model to study the performance of Software-Defined Network (SDN) switches. Here, SDN switch performance is defined as the time that an SDN switch needs to process packet without the interaction of controller. We exploit the capabilities of queueing theory based M/Geo/1 model to analyze the key factors, flowtable size, packet arrival rate, number of rules, and position of rules. The analytical model is validated using extensive simulations. Our study reveals that these factors have significant influence on the performance of an SDN switch.