A request aware module using CS-IDR to reduce VM level collateral damages caused by DDoS attack in cloud environment

Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) plays a significant role in threatening the cloud-based services. DDoS is a kind of attack which targets the CPU, bandwidth and other resources and makes them unavailable to benign users. The DDoS attack has an enormous impact on multi-tenant cloud network than the traditional network due to the cloud features like virtualization, load balancing, resource scaling and migrations. These features spread attack effects in the whole cloud network, which introduces the collateral damages to the non-target stakeholders. Some of these stakeholders are co-hosted virtual machines (VMs), host physical server, co-hosted physical server, cloud service providers and users, etc. Therefore, there is a need for a method that can reduce such collateral damages. In this work, we focus on reducing VM level collateral damages caused to the co-hosted VMs residing with the victim VM on the same host. The proposed architecture consists of: (i) a request awareness based module to reduce VM level collateral damages, (ii) to obtain the request awareness, a novel Cuckoo Search based IDentification of Request (CS-IDR) method using bivariate flight is also proposed. The CS-IDR method helps in taking the request-aware decision, which eventually reduces VM level collateral damages. The result also shows that the proposed method minimizes the CPU usage, RAM usage, power consumption, overall load, and incurred cost caused due to DDoS attack on non-target co-hosted VM, and hence reduces such collateral damages.