Detection of Economic Denial of Sustainability Using Time Spent on a Web Page in Cloud

Cloud computing is a form of utility computing where the consumers leverage computing resources. Billing is done on an hourly basis based on the amount of resources consumed. In the case of web servers the cost is based on the amount of data that leaves the web server and the number of HTTP requests received.The cloud service provider automatically scales the resources when there is a hike in consumers traffic and the cost on the consumer increases accordingly. This model can put cloud at risk by a tactful attacker who intends to lessen the profit and increase the cost for a consumer. The attacker synthetically generates HTTP requests to the web application so that they are accounted for billing but are not profitable to application provider. Thus, causing a sustainable decline in the economy of the consumer, technically named as Economic Denial of Sustainability(EDoS). The http traffic generated by the attacker mimics the genuine traffic in order to go undetected. This paper proposes a detection mechanism based on the Time Spent on a Web Page(TSP) defined as time spent on viewing a web page. The TSP of the attack traffic differs from the mean TSP of a web page. This deviation of TSP from the mean is calculated taking the exponential distribution of the TSPs and the calculated value is used to detect the surreptitious behavior.