Security Mechanisms of Distributed Denial-Of-Service (DDOS) Attack in Everything-as-a-Service (XaaS) - Survey

Abstract

— This paper illustrates research on DDoS attack which overload targeted servers with traffic to render hosted resources inaccessible and unavailable. The attacks are increasingly being launched from multiple locations, gradually spreading over larger networks, consequently to obscure the attack origin. The precipitous cloud computing as the new ‘anywhere anytime’ paradigm, in the form of Everything-as-a-Service (XaaS), transforms these attack mechanisms to become progressively destructive, affecting Quality Of Service (QoS) performance. The attack vectors examination ranges from volumetric attack that flood network links, to application layer attack that target specific services, to protocol attack that exhaust network's resources, with evolving consequences. DDoS attacks mitigation in XaaS environments poses unique challenges. Current literature explores the limitations of traditional on-premise and XaaS-based mitigation techniques to instantaneously detect and mitigate malicious traffic. The role of intelligent analytics in distinguishing legitimate and malicious traffic are also being investigated by application of machine learning algorithms to safeguard against prospective interruptions to XaaS-based services’ availability and reliability