An emulation based impact analysis of DDoS attacks on web services during flash events

Abstract

The phenomenal growth of Internet has changed the way traditional essential services such as banking, transportation, medicine, education and defense are operated. In present era, the Internet is considered as main infrastructure of the global information society. Therefore, the availability of Internet is very critical. Distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks pose an immense threat to the availability of these services. The services are severely degraded and hence lot of business loses are incurred due to these attacks. To objectively evaluate DDoS attack's impact, its severity and the effectiveness of a potential defense, a precise, quantitative and comprehensive DDoS impact metrics that are applicable to web services are required. In this paper, network topology is emulated and Flash Event (legitimate web traffic at high Rate) is generated. The attack traffic is generated at different strengths using different protocols to measure attack impact on web service. The impact is measured in terms of metrics such as Throughput, Response Time, Active Connections, Percentage of Failed transactions, Legitimate Packet Survival Ratio; Percentage of Packets Lost, Percentage of Request Packets Lost and Bottleneck Bandwidth