Main Article Content
Abstract
Cloud Computing is an emerging paradigm that allows customers to obtain cloud resources and services according to their demand. Service level agreements (SLA) regulate the costs that the cloud customers have to pay for the provided quality of service (QoS).The success of the cloud computing paradigm is mainly due to its on-demand, pay-byuse and self-service nature. According to this standard, the effects of Denial of Service (DoS) attacks involve not only the quality of the delivered service, but also the service maintenance costs in terms of resource usage. Specifically, if the detection delay is longer, the cost will be more. Therefore, a particular attention has to be paid for stealthy Denial of Service attacks. They aim at minimizing their visibility, and at the same time, they can be as harmful as the brute-force attacks. They are sophisticated attacks tailored to leverage the worst-case performance of the target system through specific periodic, pulsing, and low-rate traffic patterns. In this study, a strategy is proposed to orchestrate stealthy attack patterns, which exhibit a slowly-increasing-intensity trend designed to inflict the maximum financial cost to the cloud customer, while respecting the job size and the service arrival rate imposed by the detection mechanisms. Here both how to apply the proposed strategy, and its effects on the target system deployed in the cloud is described.