Critical Review of Economical Denial of Sustainability (EDoS) Mitigation Techniques

Abstract

Many organizations and service providers have started shifting from traditional server-cluster infrastructure to cloud-based infrastructure. The threat of Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack continues to wreak havoc in these cloud infrastructures. In addition to DDoS attacks, a new form of attack known as Economic Denial of Sustainability (EDoS) attack has emerged in recent years. EDoS which is unique to cloud infrastructure may not be easily detected as with DDoS. Although EDoS attack is small at the moment, it is expected to grow in the near future in tandem with the growth in cloud usage. As EDoS has a major impact economically, it can considered to be more serious than DDoS and many defence and mitigation mechanisms have been proposed to combat these attacks. This paper introduces EDoS and how it differs from DDoS. The existing mitigation techniques are described and the drawbacks of these techniques are explained.

Entropy-Based Economic Denial of Sustainability Detection

“…Because of this, EDoS detection is driven by metrics related with resource consumption at server-side, while conventional DDoS detections usually analyzes network traffic metrics at packet and flow level [22]. Several specific approaches against EDoS attacks are collected and discussed in [8,16,23]. Some of them aim on their detection, which typically distinguishes two methods.…”

“…Major efforts towards mitigation EDoS threats focus on deploying access control mechanisms, as is the case of Crypto-puzzles [30][31][32], Graphical Turing tests [26,33] or reputation systems [34,35]. They are effective, but as highlighted in [23], resolving hard tests or deploying complex reputation schemes consume additional resources at both client and server sides, and significantly affect the Quality of Experience (QoE) on the protected environment.…”

Detecting Workload-based and Instantiation-based Economic Denial of Sustainability on 5G environments

“…Another important topic of this research is the role of cloud computing in the SON context, which has allowed the virtualization of network functions aimed to address scalability issues of network infrastructures [45], which in the meantime yields the reduction of costs in the deployment of sensors and actuators involved at SON. That network elasticity is orchestrated through auto-scaling policies, which expose vulnerabilities that can be exploited by an attacker with the aim to produce an economical overspending of the target victims, hence making a cloud service unsustainable [6]. This effect is known as Economical Denial of Sustainability (EDoS), and it poses security threats which have not been reviewed in depth by the research community, being frequently confused with flooding-based or complexity-based Denial of Service (DoS) attacks.…”