Economic denial of sustainability (EDoS) mitigation approaches in cloud: Analysis and open challenges

Economic denial of sustainability (EDoS) appeared to be a new menace of cloud computing. This pristine attack is a breed of DoS or DDoS attack that targets the vulnerabilities of cloud consumers utility pricing model. EDoS attackers steadily send illegitimate traffic to gradually consume cloud resources such as virtual machines, virtual network devices, virtual security devices and databases so that it can trigger auto scaling features of cloud. Consequently, targeted cloud consumer ends up with an exorbitant amount of bill that may lead to bankruptcy. The other side effect of this attack is the persistent degradation of services faced by benign cloud users. This paper gives an overview of mitigation approaches proposed by researchers over the years exclusively for EDoS attack defense. We present a taxonomy of EDoS mitigation strategies with circumspect. The taxonomy focus evaluation metric used to mitigate EDoS along with its applicability in cloud environment. We further explore some open challenges that are yet to come into the light. Finally, a probable future direction is given at the end of this paper.