The Impact of DDoS Attacks on the Power Usage of Virtual Execution Environments

A machine's power consumption relies heavily on the processes being executed within that machine. A Distributed Process Execution Environment is a common process that can have varying degrees of efficiency and usage of computing resources. The efficiency and use of computing resources can depend on the type of Distributed Process Execution Environment and the tasks being executed within the environment. Comparing different types of Distributed Process Execution Environment's effect on the host machine's power consumption, by executing tasks with a varying level of demand within the Distributed Process Execution Environment, will demonstrate the efficiency of each. Distributed Denial of Service, DDoS, attacks are one method of placing stress on different components of the Distributed Process Execution Environment. The experiment was performed by having several compute nodes as Attackers that worked together to perform a DDoS attack on a single machine, the Defender, running the Distributed Process Execution Environments. As the Defender was undergoing the DDoS attacks, its performance was measured in watts.