Performance Analysis of an Effective Approach to Protect Cloud Systems against Application Layer Based Attacks

Cloud computing is a new paradigm for hosting hardware and software resources and provides a web-based services to organizations and consumers. It also provides an easy to use and on-demand access to cloud based computing resources that can be published by easy, minimal administration and with a great efficiency. Services of cloud computing are accessing and sharing through internet connection thus it is open for attacker to attack on its security. Application layer based attacks is one of Distributed Denial of Service attacks (DDoS) that can cause a big problem in cloud security. The main objective of DDoS attacks is to infect computer resources (e.g., software applications, network, CPU, etc.) and make them not working properly for the authorized users. In DDoS, the attacker tries to overload the web-based service with traffic. HTTP and XML-based DDoS attacks are founded under the application layer based category of DoS attacks. This category of attack is focused on particular web applications. The main objective of this research paper is to introduce an effective approach to protect cloud-based systems against application layer based attacks. Complexity analysis, effectiveness and performance evaluations of the presented approach are presented. The feedbacks of the experimental results were highly promising, for protecting cloud computing systems against both DoS and DDoS attacks. Correlation analysis model is also used to validate the efficiency of the proposed approach.