A Microservice Assisted Multi-Level DDoS Defense Mechanism in Containerized Cloud Environments

Abstract

Cloud computing revolutionized the delivery of IT services by providing unparalleled scalability, flexibility, and cost savings. The expansion of cloud computing also attracts Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attackers, causing them to shift their targets from traditional server systems to cloud infrastructure. DDoS attacks bombard systems with malicious traffic, creating a significant threat to the availability of cloud services. In the state-of-the-art solutions, we found that resource isolation for legitimate users plays a crucial role in maintaining the service availability under DDoS attacks. By isolating resources, target services are able to maintain their functionality for legitimate users without experiencing substantial interruption, even in the presence of a DDoS attack. In this work, we proposed a robust defense system against DDoS attacks that employs three strategies: categorizing incoming requests based on the frequency of their submissions to different services, allocating resources for distinct services, and implementing a microservice architecture within a cloud infrastructure based on containers. The incoming requests are categorized into four distinct categories: red, orange, yellow, and green. Each category was determined by the number of requests made for a specific service in comparison to threshold values. Subsequently, the requests were served in separate containers. To implement microservice architecture, we deploy each web service on distinct containers. This implies that requests from various users for distinct services get served in separate containers. We tested this approach in three distinct scenarios (E1, E2, and E3) by varying the number of web services at the target infrastructure (2 services on E1, 3 services on E2, and 5 services on E3). By this, we test the scalability of the proposed defense system in the presence of DDoS attacks. The experimental results show that the proposed defense system is highly effective, maintaining service availability up to 90% even under DDoS attacks. This result demonstrates the system's ability to keep services running smoothly for legitimate users, even in the presence of DDoS attacks.