Defense schemes for variants of distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks in cloud computing: A survey

Cloud computing is a fast-growing and promising technology segment that aims to reduce maintenance and management costs by shifting high-quality computing infrastructure to the Internet. It is emerging as a dominant technology because it provides an on-demand, self-service, scalable, and pay-per-use business model. Despite its numerous benefits, it suffers from several security challenges. As a consequence of on-demand service, availability of computing resources is the crucial attribute of cloud computing among security necessities. In this work, a survey is presented on various issues related to the availability of resources in a cloud environment. Ensuring availability and security of computing/storage resources are still challenging tasks. The adversary class readily exploits the vulnerabilities in the cloud infrastructure for attack implementation. The article presents a study of various categories of distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks in cloud computing and their defense mechanisms. It is believed that this is the first work which surveys all varieties of DDoS attacks in the cloud environment.