Modeling Cloud Environment for Assessing Denial of Service Attack

Cloud computing allows users to store and process their data in third party data centers. There is a need for secure and reliable measures to be taken to prevent loss of data, authentication problems and other security issues. This paper discusses steps followed to set up a private cloud using an open source software platform, OpenStack. Setting up the private cloud not only ensures the privacy as it eliminates the involvement of a third party cloud service provider but also provides us with a cheaper alternative. A Denial of Service (DoS) attack is a type of security attack where in the main aim is to overload the machine making it inaccessible to legitimate users. To assess DoS attack, we develop a web application running on one of the instances of our cloud. We analyze the DoS attack on this application using a DoS algorithm running on one of the instances in cloud. The performance of the cloud under the attack and without the attack is analyzed and conclusions about the risks involved are drawn. By assessing these risks, the performance degradation of the cloud is visualized using Wireshark and SlowHTTPTest tools.