Avoiding Denial of Service via Stress Testing

Abstract

Stress-testing has been widely used by businesses, governments, and other organizations to evaluate the strength of their web applications against various attacks. However, the quality of these tests is under constant scrutiny to determine their effectiveness. The present study compares four stress-testing tools, by performing the tests on two major web-based applications. All of the tools used are open source, and run on Win32 platform. The test scenarios are recorded from server log files to make the tests more realistic. Lastly, we discuss how to use stress-testing tools as a measure to avoid Denial of Service attacks on web servers and web applications.

A Survey on Load Testing of Large-Scale Software Systems

“…The rate at which different service requests are submitted to the system under test (SUT) is called the load [73]. The load-related problems can be either functional problems that appear only under load (e.g, such as deadlocks, racing, buffer overflows and memory leaks [23], [24], [25]) or non-functional problems which are violations in non-functional quality-related requirements under load (e.g., reliability [23], [37], stability [10], and robustness [30]). Load testing is conducted on a system (either a prototype or a fully functional system) rather than on a design or an architectural model.…”

“…Load testing is conducted on a system (either a prototype or a fully functional system) rather than on a design or an architectural model. In the case Load Testing [14], [18], [19], [20], [21], [22], [23], [24], [25], [26], [27], [28], [29], Stress Testing [18], [26], [30], [31], [32], [33], [34] Yes Detecting violations in performance requirements under load Testing (After Conventional Functional Testing)…”

“…Load Testing [10], Stress Testing [30], [10] Yes Measuring and/or evaluating system performance under load Implementation Performance Testing [39], [40], [41], [42] Depends…”

Dominant behavior identification of load data

“…Stress testing verifies the application behavior when more than specified load interact with the application [4] [6]. This kind of testing also shows the boundary values of the application.…”

“…Abu-Nimeh, S. Nair, and M. Marchetti [6] introduced the stress testing and working of the web application under the stress load. They described various approaches of the stress testing towards the web application under consideration.…”